XON THE REIGN OF THE HEART
“The knowledge of external things does not make up for me, in times of affliction, for my ignorance of the moral world; but my knowledge of the moral world always consoles me for my ignorance of external things.”—Pascal.
“The knowledge of external things does not make up for me, in times of affliction, for my ignorance of the moral world; but my knowledge of the moral world always consoles me for my ignorance of external things.”—Pascal.
It has come, the time of affliction!
Whatever may be the outcome of this war, it marks a period of profound despair for humanity. However great may be the pride of victory, however generous such a victory may be, under whatever light the distant consequences may be presented to us, we live, none the less, in a blighted age, on an earth that will be devastated for long years, in the midst of a society that is decimated, ruined, crushed by its wounds.
Among all our disillusionments, if there is one that remains especially painful to us it is the sort of bankruptcy of which our whole civilization is convicted.
Man had never been prouder than at the beginning of the twentieth century of the discoveries he hadrealized in the domain of what Pascal called “the external sciences.”
We must admit that there was some excuse for this intoxication, this error. In its struggle with matter, humanity had experienced a success that was so daring, so disconcerting, and above all so repeated that it lost a just conception of its adversary and forgot that its principal enemy was itself.
Events have recalled this to it in a flash. In the last year or two it has expressed its discomfiture through millions of simple lips. It has asked with anguish how “a century so advanced in civilization” could give birth to this demoralizing catastrophe. Stupefied, it sees turning against itself all those inventions which, it had been told, were made for its happiness. For hardly one is absent. Even those that seemed the highest in moral significance, even they, have contributed in some degree to the disaster. Only the fear of creating an uncontrollable situation has prevented certain of the belligerents from forming an alliance with the very germs of epidemic diseases and thus debasing the noblest of all the acquisitions of science.
A doubt has grown up in all hearts: what, after all, is this civilization from which we draw such pride and which we claim the right to impose upon the peoples of the other continents? What is this thing that has suddenly revealed itself as so cruel, sodangerous, as destitute of soul as its own machines?
Eyes have been opened, spirits have been illuminated: never did barbarism, in all its brutality and destructiveness, attain results as monstrous as those of which our industrial and scientific civilization has proved itself capable. Is it indeed anything but a travesty on barbarism?
What inclines one to believe this is that the peoples which have dedicated to the gods of the factory and the laboratory the most fervent and the most vainglorious worship have shown themselves in this way by far the cruellest, the most fertile in inhumane and disgraceful inventions.
M. Bergson has said, of the intelligence, that it is “characterized by a natural incomprehension of life.” To this one might add: and by a complete incomprehension of happiness, which is the very aim of life.
With its retinue of ingenious inventions and clever complications, the intelligence plays the part of something irresponsible or criminal in the great disorder of the world. It seems not only incapable of giving happiness to men, but actually adapted to bewilder them, corrupt them, set them quarreling. It knows how to provoke conflicts; it is unable either to exorcise them or to resolve them.
Scientific and industrial civilization based upon the intelligence is condemned. For long years it hasmonopolized and distracted all human energies. Its reign has ended in an immense defeat.
It is toward the resources of the heart that our hope turns. Betrayed by this clever intelligence, whose formidable works have at times the very look of stupidity itself, we aspire to the reign of the heart; all our desires turn toward a moral civilization, such as is alone capable of exalting us, satisfying us, protecting us, assuring us the true burgeoning of our race.
It is by juggling with words that people have been able to attach the idea of true progress to the development of the mechanical, chemical or biological sciences. True progress concerns nothing but the soul, it remains independent of the expedients and the practices of science. This latter is able to triumph even when the true progress, the ascent of mankind toward happiness, is interrupted and thwarted in its profoundest tendencies.
There are not lacking people to tell us that the war will mark with precision the advent of a new world, that it has bought in the blood and the flame the moral elevation necessary for a fruitful and final peace. We cannot share this optimism of official eloquence. It is not the performance of tasks of murder that opens to men the road to justice andconverts them to good customs. Humanity must grow unaccustomed to crime, and it is not the armed intelligence that can accomplish this miracle. The pacifying work of the war will remain in peril if everything that is healthy and generous in humanity does not labor to dethrone this scientific civilization which still abuses society after having reduced it to helplessness.
I consider as negligible the objection of the stoics who say that these miseries do not depend upon us and that we ought obstinately to seek our happiness through them, isolate our happiness from the surrounding degradation. No! These miseries do depend upon us. In spite of its disdainful nobility, the stoic resignation has here too much the look of egoism.
This moral civilization, when its hour comes, will revive Christianity and propagate it; it will not leave the human race in the abandonment of the desperate misery of today.
The naturalists and the sociologists have contributed to spread this idea that moral progress is, for individuals, a function of the anatomical complex, and for societies of the complex of habits, institutions and industries. It is on this understanding that they have undertaken the classification ofspecies and arranged the various human hierarchies.
That is a view entirely external to things, it cannot be verified as regards individual thought, it is a sheer fabrication as regards collectivities: the war is a bloody refutation of it.
If we mean by moral progress that which affects the conditions of happiness, nothing permits us to conjecture what advantages have been realized in this direction by the vegetable and animal organisms that have not chosen us as confidents. Habits, as we observe them, cannot be a criterion, even if we admit that we ought to seek for evidence among them; they seem as if designed to baffle all theories.
Those animals whose anatomical structure closely resembles ours, not to say that it is exactly analogous to ours, such as cattle and sheep, give proof of a moral activity that is insignificant beside the real genius shown by the bee and so many other insects whose nervous systems are still rudimentary in comparison with those of the mammals.
Certain sea animals, the barnacles, have suffered, because of their sedentary existence, an anatomical regression. We know that the mobile larvæ of the barnacles possess more complicated organisms than those of the adult and stationary animal. To conclude from that that this anatomical regression is a lowering of the species is to assume a great deal, andit is to accord to movement a very debatable significance.
There exist species of plant life, especially among the conifers and the ferns, which, for thousands of centuries, seem to have remained in an almost stable anatomical and functional stage. These species are none the less very widely scattered and very long-lived, very adaptable. They offer an outward appearance of happiness and prosperity. On the other hand, nothing permits us to affirm that certain species, like the orchids, which have undergone a delirious evolution resulting in forms of extreme anatomical complexity, have attained a true progress, have improved, that is to say, their moral destiny: we see them subject to innumerable external servitudes. Their reproduction, even, is only possible thanks to the intervention of outside agencies and is fraught with perils. A seductive argument that smacks of anthropomorphism inclines us to believe that these species, intoxicated with their material difficulties, ought to have a less free and less serene philosophical existence.
The complexity of the individual organism, which corresponds strictly to the political, economic and scientific complexity of societies, adds neither to the possibilities of life, nor to its scope of activity, nor to its hopes.
Certain fish, the pleuronectes, have sought theirsalvation in a very bold, precocious development that ends in a displacement of their eyes, of their mouth and in a profound disorder of their original symmetry. Looking at them, one has the impression that this development has thrown them into an impasse, into acul-de-sacfrom which it would be difficult for them to escape into a new evolution; one has the impression that this whole biological stratagem has considerably restricted the destiny of the species.
Besides, and the naturalists know it very well, the species that are most highly evolved, most differentiated, to employ the consecrated expression, are in a certain sense the oldest species, imprisoned in their own tradition and scarcely to be counted upon for a new adaptation, a profound reformation of their organs and their habits.
This digression, too long for our restlessness, but too succinct in view of the facts it involves, raises several criticisms.
One might, in the first place, object that evolution is a thing which species undergo and which they cannot influence themselves. If that is true, humanity finds itself forced into an adventure against which it is puerile and presumptuous to contend.
This attitude implies a submissive fatalism that denies both our sense of experience and our thirst forperfection. We are apt to construe our lessons in such a way as to draw instruction from them. We have shown this in many moments of crisis, and we feel a certain repugnance to thinking that we cannot turn to our own profit the most majestic lesson that has ever been given to men.
Certain minds, on the other hand, have concluded that humanity is altogether too old, too highly evolved a species to be capable of ever again renouncing what is fundamental in its inveterate intellectual traditions, its scientific acquisitions and the customs that have sprung from them.
If this conception of the world did not appear as if stamped with lassitude and scepticism, it would seem to leave us in the presence of a desperate alternative: either the acceptance of a life without restraint, given over to every sort of folly, exposed to every sort of lapse into crime, or the solitary search for an oblivion that only waits for death.
But will the peoples who have struggled so fiercely for their material interests remain disarmed in the face of the moral danger that threatens the very morning of the race, will they undertake nothing truly efficacious for the sake of posterity?
That is the anxiety that haunts generous souls today.
The political arrangements that will mark the end of this war will be of no real interest if the mindsthat control the spiritual direction of the peoples do not labor, from now on-and in the future, to modify the meaning of the ideas of progress and civilization.
We cannot believe that humanity is so deeply sunk in its convictions and its intellectual habits as to remain forever incapable of sudden change and reform.
The human world has already passed through important crises; it has already been forced several times to reshape the idea it had formed of culture and civilization.
It has always been amid its ruins that it has meditated the conditions of a new life. If it is true that ruins demand the revolution of customs, let us admit that the heart of man has never been more urgently entreated than today.
In any case, there is no question of giving up those customs that form an integral part of our vital economy. It would be fantastic to consider the regeneration of a society that was deprived, for example, of the means of communication which have obtained for a century and which we could scarcely abandon now without suicide. But it is fair to consider how great and dangerous is the hold of the false needs which the study of the “external sciences” creates in us and not to permit our ideal activity to be blindly enslaved any longer by our material ingenuity.
There exist in our nature ardent forces that onecannot condemn without appeal and that will manifest themselves against all discipline.
The passion of the sciences must be deeply-rooted when we see men, in love with love, peace, humanity, consecrating themselves, as if in their own despite, under the cover of some abstract sophistry, to tasks whose results may contribute seriously to the wretchedness and the debasement of society.
If one might gather together all the faculties of the spirit for the single cause of happiness!
At least, and from now on, let us cease to consider that the monstrous development of industrial science represents civilization; otherwise let us withdraw from this word its whole moral significance and seek another for the needs of our ideal.
Let us cease humiliating moral culture, the only pledge we have of peace and happiness, before the irresponsible and unruly genius that haunts the laboratories. Scientific civilization, let us say, to allow it to keep this name for a moment, has been for us so prodigal in bitterness that we can no longer abandon it uncontrolled to its devouring activity. We must make use of it as a servant and cease any longer to adore it as a goddess.
We must revise all our definitions, all our values, our whole vocabulary.
All fervent spirits should set themselves to this work, and their task will be all the heavier the more widely extended they are assured their influence will be.
We must strive to make our stunned humanity realize that happiness does not consist in travelling at the rate of sixty miles an hour, rising up into the air on a machine or talking under the ocean, but above all else in being rich in beautiful thoughts, contented with its work, honored with warm affections.
We must restore the cult of the arts which contribute to the purification of the soul, which are consoling in times of affliction and remain, by their nature, incapable of serving ignoble ends.
We must employ our strength to altering the meaning of the words “riches,” “possessions,” “authority,” to showing that they are things of the soul and that the material acceptance of these terms corresponds to realities that are perfidious and ironical. We must at the same time transform the ideas of benevolence and ambition, open a new career to these virtues, create for them new ends and new satisfactions. Those who consider such a program with irony or scepticism make a great mistake. Its realization may seem illusory, but it will undoubtedly become a necessity. The material goods at the disposal of humanity will find themselves considerably reduced both by the destruction of which they havebeen the object and by the long arrest of the production of them.
Their rarity and their growing expensiveness will be the source of grave and almost insoluble conflicts, which new effusions of blood will only make more venomous.
Humanity can hurl against this terrible future a defiance full of grandeur. It can, under the influence of its spiritual masters, seek its happiness in a wise and passionate transformation of its desires.
Let us not urge it toward resignation but toward the conquest of the true riches, those that assure it the moral possession of the world.
The economists, whose science the war has so often tested, are laboring to define what will be the conditions of life in the period that will follow the world war; their estimates leave little room for the hope of an agreeable and easy material existence; they hold over the mass of men, conquered and conquerors alike, the menace of desperate labor and slight and wretched returns.
These learned researches, added to the similar conclusions of common sense, do not seem to discourage the laborious race of men. They have been told they must work, and even now, while they are struggling against a hundred fearful perils, they are mentallypreparing to earn their difficult living, if only the war does not take away their lives.
The modern industrial monster sets these conditions in advance. We already know that competition will be pitiless, we know too that enjoyment will only be for the highest bidder. Individuals, at the sight of this future, mutually urge one another to be stubborn. The world is preparing to take up again, obstinately, the old order that has cost it so many trials. As yet no one speaks of a new life.
There will be so many voices to praise these desperate resolutions, so many books will be written to persuade men to persevere in their old hatreds that a timid voice may well raise itself to protest against the consummation of the error.
A man whom I love and esteem above all others once said to me:
“When peace is signed and I return home, I shall have to give up all the distractions I used to have if I wish to work as much as will be necessary to recover a situation as good as the one I had before.”
Believe me, O my friend who said these words to me, I love work too well to blame your decision; but I was thinking only of your happiness, and it was of your situation that you spoke to me. Are you sure that they are rightly related, those two words, those two ideas? What do you hope from the futureif you are not going to allow a large place in it to the soul?
What compensation will be left for our passion of today if we take up all our prejudices again, if we return to our own vomit?
The old civilization seems condemned. To break with it, we must first of all seek our individual satisfaction outside money, our happiness outside the whirlpool of pleasure. We must flee deliberately from the tyranny of luxury. In this way even the events of the present oblige us to seek our true path. Must we keep blindly and obstinately to the ways of slavery? We have slighted the best sources of interest, joy and wealth; shall we misprize them now that they remain the only fresh and faithful things in the aridity of our time? Shall we neglect our souls again to seek a false fortune that can only betray us? Shall we contend with exasperated brutes over possessions we know to be unstable and deceptive?
No! No! Here should lie the lesson and the one benefit of this war: that we should undeceive ourselves about ourselves and about our ends! Let us not devote our courage to choosing a ferocious discipline devoid of the ideal. Let us once for all reject our calculating and demoralizing intelligence. Let us organize, in the peace that returns, the reign of the heart.
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 weare 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.
VIII
If the future laws governing labor do not allow enough time for the cultivation and the flourishing of the soul, a sacred struggle will become inevitable.
The organizers of the modern world, who have shown themselves powerless to avert war and did not realize the vanity of our old civilization, do not yet seem to foresee the urgency of radical changes in the moral education of the peoples.
They continue to talk to us about the superhuman efforts we must make in order to redeem their faults.
No one shrinks before these efforts. Society is weary of crime but not of peaceful tasks. Everyone prepares with joyous energy to take up his former position and his tools again.
It rests with us all to mitigate the severity of economic conflicts by working to transform the current idea of happiness.
The possessors of material wealth have, in general, for centuries, given to those whom they employ and direct so scandalous and basely immoral an example that they themselves are the principal fomenters of the attacks which they will henceforth have to undergo.
In the machinery of modern industry, work has lost a great many of its attractive virtues: all themethods in force tend to diminish the part played by the soul and the heart, and the workman, imprisoned in an almost mechanical function, no longer expects from work the personal satisfaction he once obtained; as a poet has said: “His empty labor is the fate he fights against.”
Certain American methods have based their theory upon a clever sophism; they exaggerate the automatic under the pretext of thus cutting short the length of the work. That is not a happy solution, to cut short the hours of labor by emptying it of all joy, of all professional interest. It is better to undertake a long piece of work with relish than to hurry through a short task with repugnance.
The specialization that is rendered necessary by the very extent of scientific and industrial activity remains a dangerous thing, especially among an old race of encyclopedists like ourselves.
However that may be, the peoples consent to yield themselves to the discretion of the modern world. May the monster leave them some scraps of a liberty that is still honorable enough for them to think of cultivating their souls. There will not be lacking men of good will who will be glad to devote themselves to directing this liberty, to transforming the meaning and the demands of joy, propagating a culture which, unlike those old errors, will support education more readily than instruction,—men who willmore often address themselves to the heart than to the disastrous reason.
France has suffered, suffers and will suffer more deeply than all the other countries of the world. She is at once the altar and the holocaust. She has sacrificed her men, her cities, and her soil. It is in the heart of her beautiful fields that the devastating storm whirls and roars.
In the depths of my soul I hope that, because of this great grief, it will be France that will give the signal for redemption. I hope that the reign of the heart will begin just here where the old civilization will leave imperishable traces of its murderous folly.
The resources of the French people in perseverance, in self-reliance, in goodness, in subtle delicacy are so great that one feels a word would suffice to rally all hearts and give them their bearings. One feels that at the mere phrase “moral civilization” thousands and thousands of noble heads will nod approval, thousands of hands will reach out to find each other.
People who have obstinate views on the political meaning of wars, on the eminently economic nature of the peril that has been run by humanity, and on the efficacy of the industrial and scientific civilization, will not fail to proclaim that France ought first ofall to return to its furious task and apply itself to surpassing the peoples that have outstripped it along this path.
But France has always been the country of initiation and revelation. It is the chosen land of spiritual revolutions. May the bloody baptism it has received give it precedence in the discussion of the future!
Do you wish it to lose the glorious rank it holds in the moral order, at the head of the nations, that it may fall in line behind the peoples who are enslaved by automatism and swear allegiance to a worn-out, condemned, bankrupt social and economic religion?
If the destiny of our country is to make a humanity that is plunged in affliction give ear to the words of peace, consolation and love, let it accomplish this beautiful mission, let it teach the other peoples the generous laws of the true possession of the world.
My work is finished, and now the time has come for me to part with it.
It is going off into this misty autumn night. My heart is both glad and sorrowful.
It is going away from me, henceforth to follow a destiny of its own that will no longer depend only upon my love.
I shall turn to other duties, I shall assume other cares. A voice tells me that they will always be thesame duties, the same cares, and that there is no longer but one great task for men, one single task with a hundred radiant aspects.
It is late. The night is drawing to a close; it is calm and yet penetrated with a vast, subdued murmur of joy. They say it is one of the last nights of the war.
I hear about me the panting breath of the wounded. There are several hundred of them; they are sleeping or longing for sleep and rest. Their burning breath is like a lamentation. Many of them will never see the peace they have so dearly bought. They are perhaps the wounded of the last battle, the last victims, the last martyrs.
Over the whole face of the world souls are suffering with them, for them, souls which the angel of death laboring here this night will not deliver.
My work is finished. It begins to withdraw from me. If it can bring any consolation to a single one of these suffering souls, let me believe that it has fulfilled its destiny.
THE END