PREFACE

In the month of June, 1902, when I published “The Fear of Living,” I had no idea how favorably it would be received by the public. Family tragedies were not the fashion, and I had dared to take a sorely-tried old woman for my heroine.

Since that time new editions have succeeded one another every year. I have had to answer many hundreds of letters (often very badly and briefly) which made me see that I had friends among my readers. At last I was asked, both in France and abroad, to explain the ideas which are the foundation of my work. So, although my novel only aims at increasing the will and the courage to live and not at establishing any doctrine, I was induced to speak about our various modern attitudes towards life. After my addresses I was honored by a request to put them into print. I have gathered together here the notes which helped me to prepare them. If after four years I feel some pride in recording the prolonged influence of a work whose art is perfectly natural and sincere, I must thank for it all those unknown friends who contributedto the result by their infectious sympathy.

The fear of living is a disease which extends its ravages principally to old civilisations like our own. The symptoms of this moral phthisis may be outwardly contradictory; for there are two ways of being afraid to live as there are two kinds of selfishness.

The first, the most frequent to-day and the most cowardly, has already been denounced by Dante, who in the third Canto of theInferno, brands it with the red-hot iron of his scorn. Guided by Virgil, the poet arrives at the gate of the City of Tears. He has not yet entered the door when he hears, rising up to him from the bottom of the abyss, groans, shrieks and cries of despair, which resound under a starless sky. From what lips do these sounds proceed, these sounds which come from near Hell, but not from Hell itself? Dante in his distress asks his master for an explanation.

“Master,” I said, “what do I hear, and what is this crowd which seems so crushed by sorrow?”

And he said: “This is the miserable fate of the sad souls of all those who have lived without blame and without praise. They are mingled with that dread chorus of angels who were neither faithful to God,nor rebellious, but who existed for themselves only. They have been banished from Heaven, because they spoiled its beauty, and the depths of Hell would not receive them because the damned would gain some glory by their presence.”

And I said: “Master, what is the torment that is crushing them and makes them weep so bitterly?”

He answered me: “I will tell you briefly. They have no hope of dying, and their dark life is so vile that they are envious of every other fate. The world has no memory of them, and mercy and justice despise them. Do not speak of them; look and pass on....”

If the “Inferno” describes worse torments, it contains no words more scathing in their disdain than these which describe “those inert ones who are pleasing neither to God nor to his enemies.” The misers who carry burdens, the evil-tempered who struggle in a bog, the voluptuous dragged into an endless whirl-wind, the rogues plunged into a lake of boiling pitch, have deserved their punishment by their acts, and have asserted themselves in evil-doing. The others have asserted themselves neither in evil nor in good. Neither virtuous nor vicious, we do not know what they were. Dull, flabby, and soft, they have not left behind the memory of any personality. They scarcely lived; theywere afraid to live.

For the fear of living means precisely that,—to deserve neither blame nor praise. It is the constant all-prevailing desire for peace. It is the flight from responsibilities, struggles, risks, and efforts. It is the careful avoidance of danger, fatigue, exaltation, passion, enthusiasm, sacrifice, every violent action, everything that disturbs and upsets. It is the refusal of life’s claims upon our hearts, our sweat, and our blood. In short, it is the pretence of living, while limiting life, while setting bounds to our destinies. It is that passive selfishness which would rather retrench its appetite than seek the food which it requires; the selfishness which is meanly content with a colorless, dull life, provided it is sure of meeting with no shocks, no difficulties, no obstacles, like the traveler who will only journey along plains and on rubber tires.

Must we quote examples? It is the fear of living which inspires a young man in the choice of a profession, which shows him the special advantages of an official career providing him, in return for work that is moderate in amount and does not take up much time, with a fixed salary and a pension; that modest dream which inspired Goncourt to make this epigram—“France is a country where one sows functionaries and reaps taxes.” Is it not this fear much more often than a keen sense ofjustice, that drives the weak and envious to that Socialism which would result in the establishment of an all-round equality of mediocrity?

It is certainly this fear which, when it does not lead to a comfortable, selfish, practical, bachelor’s life, prompts those marriages wherein one consults one’s lawyer rather than one’s heart, and thinks of income rather than of the advantages of beauty, physical and moral health, education, courage, ability and taste. Certain theories of the day, which on their critical side are not without justification, pretend to purify the sources of marriage by suppressing the consent of parents which is often too apt to overlook personal characteristics through consideration of the advantages to be gained, and by multiplying the facilities for union with the facilities for divorce; in a word, by associating marriage with those other unions which have no regard for the social order, into which they introduce anarchy. But marriage is the gateway of the family, the foundation of the home; its aim is to complete two lives by joining the one to the other and to bring other beings into the world. It cannot rely solely on that love which is commonly represented with bandaged eyes; for it is not purely an individual act, in that it both continues a tradition and perpetuates a race. Is it the importance of this race and thistradition which has to be considered, or is it only a petty ideal of practical happiness, comfortable and ignoble? Can man not feel himself fit to guide, guard, and direct the destinies of his own? Can woman not deprive herself of luxuries that are useless, or at least merely accessory? Would life, stripped of so many accessories and so many useless things, simplified but not diminished, become unacceptable? Must the place of moral force be taken by the heritage handed down by one’s father?

After marriage, we find again the fear of living in the dread of having children and the restraint of parenthood. To create life has become too heavy a responsibility, too irksome a burden, above all a nuisance; and it is thus that France has been called the land of only sons. By suppressing the choice of making a will the Civil Code has struck a heavy blow at the coherent unity of the family, grouped round its head and supported by its land. But we have lately been told byLa Réforme Socialeof the method employed by the Normandy peasants, after having already been employed by so many of the bourgeoisie for the preservation of the inheritance. For the heir nominated by the father, or according to custom, is substituted the only son. In the mountains of Savoy the traveller often notices on the slopes bordering the roads, and sometimes even in the hollows of hidden valleys,shrines dedicated to Our Lady of Deliverance. Young, wives in the hope of having children used to make pilgrimages to these shrines. To-day young wives thank God for a barrenness which in former days was a reproach. A child is such a rarity that it is watched over and spoilt. Thus the fear of living has its effect even on those destinies which depend, so far as their beginnings are concerned, upon us only. So many fathers and mothers cannot consent to be separated from their children, and turn them aside from careers that are wider but more adventurous, from marriages which would take them far away but which would be morally advantageous to them; they weaken them, enervate or wear out their courage instead of arousing it, and in their sentimental selfishness impose on them a servitude which lowers their characters.

Of this fear of living, however, examples are to be found in our public life, in our social life, in the art which expresses the feeling of our times, in our institutions, even in matters of our health.

In public life, why is abstention from the franchise attributed to the moderate party, to those whom one calls or who call themselves “respectable” people?—as if there were such a thing as negative respectability! Quite recently men boasted in certain circles that they never voted; and, if they do not boast of this any more, theymake their voting subordinate to hunting and entertainments, and it is fashionable to affect the greatest contempt for politics. In the life of a modern nation, rightly or wrongly, everything reduces itself to politics or is influenced by politics. This is a fact against which it is useless to protest. “The really useful work,” said Mr. Roosevelt, President of the United States, “is not accomplished by the critic who keeps out of the battle but by the man of action who bravely takes part in the struggle, without fear at the sight of blood or sweat.” We have so many of these critics who keep out of the battle and read the papers every morning in order to be able to discuss the affairs of the nation in a superior tone, who vainly regret the past, sigh over the future, and discourage those who undertake to show them the way.

The mere fact of living in society, of enjoying social rank, creates social duties. No one has the right to arrange his life separately, for no one person can dispense with the rest. To pay one’s taxes, grumbling all the time, is not enough. The wealth which represents accumulated work in the past does not exempt one from work. Since it furnishes the means of better and greater production, it should result, not in a class of people who enjoy it, but in a class of leaders; and a leader is one who understands how to take on himself the greatest share ofthe work and responsibility. But, to judge from observation, it would seem that wealth is only a factor in selfishness, an occasion for petty and ridiculous pleasures—as though wealth were more difficult to bear than poverty. The latter constantly furnishes examples of solidarity and devotion. In these strikes, too often gotten up by the leaders for their own purpose, do we not see the workmen suffering from hunger and poverty for the sake of one another, or subscribing a tithe of their modest wages to help their comrades in other towns and other trades? Do we not find Victor Hugo’sPauvres Gensto the very life in those paragraphs which tell, in two or three lines, how at the death of some poor wretch with a family the neighbours have fought for possession of the orphaned children, even before the charitable organisations or private benevolence have had time to intervene?

There is no doubt that poverty is very painful to look upon. It disturbs our peace, our comfort, our natural forgetfulness of all that does not minister to our pleasures. People even consent to be generous—through the medium of someone else—to escape the inconvenience of sorrowful spectacles. We have our nerves, our refinement, our horror of the importunate, and we adroitly evade the demands of charity, although we can never deny the power of its appeal. “I do not want to see either illness or death,” says Hedda Gabler,Ibsen’s most morbid heroine, to her husband. “Spare me the sight of everything that is ugly.” And this æsthetic person, at the moment when she kills herself in disgust after having lived for herself alone, sees that ridicule and low ideals have infected like a curse everything she touched.

In the realm of art, the fear of living is mingled with the fear of feeling. It moves those dilettantes who wish neither to make a choice nor to give themselves up, who only yield themselves temporarily to all their intellectual or plastic impulses without ever surrendering to enthusiasm, and who consider themselves superior because they float on the top of things; for, deep as the subject be, love alone can penetrate beneath the surface. This fear also actuates those artists who, in the name of pure art, reject from their work all humanity and poetry; who substitute for those familiar conflicts of the soul, which are the life-food of ancient tragedy, the pretty but unsubstantial painting of pleasure, and are content to elaborate their style like the sides of a costly but empty vase—without the slightest suspicion that in art, as in everything else, there is a definite order of merit, and that they are seated on the lowest step.

It is everywhere, this fear of living; it provides inspiration forthe effeminate novelists and the incapable dramatists, who can create none but inconsistent characters, incapable of analysis. In the trivial adventures of their puppets they show us that everything is a matter of arrangement and nothing is worth being taken seriously, instead of inviting us to take our lives in our own hands. The great human cries, in art, are cries of strength and courage, and are often forced into utterance by unhappiness; suggesting that perhaps the happy spirit lacks the depth that is to be found in the abysses of life.

Lastly, timidity, reserve, and a prudence that is sometimes legitimate but often excessive, find their expression even in our public institutions, which multiply our guardians, put us all into leading strings, and relegate to the State the duty of looking after and helping us on all occasions. They have even undertaken to replace the old-fashioned Providence—and by what? By insurance companies! We insure ourselves against accidents, against risks, against death—indeed a far-sighted wisdom! Why should we not be insured also against fear?

Fear stamps the faces of the young men of the new generation, who appear to be anxious only about their health, and who, unable to digest except by the help of mineral waters and camomile, open their mouths only to criticise and to disparage; who praise nothing, like nothing,want nothing, as if they had fishes’ blood in their veins. Why all this trouble to preserve and keep themselves, for all the good that they get out of or contribute to life?

Could youth set less value than it does upon life? The recent suicide of a schoolboy at Lyons added a fresh paragraph—the most terrible of all—to the indictment of theDéracinés, the Uprooted ones, against an education which ignores the facts of family, race, locality, and country. Before going to his death the poor lad wrote on the blackboard, “I am young, I am pure, and I am going to die.” The teaching of his professor of philosophy had disgusted him with life.

What had they taught him? The beauty of pure reason, of science, of humanitarianism. Instead of being told to take his proper place in the order of things, he was called upon to destroy all in order to rebuild all again, to make a clean slate of the past, of tradition, of the destiny which had caused him to be born in a particular country at a particular date, in order to create a new personality for himself, a new universe, a new God. Besides preparing for his material future they expected of him, as of all Frenchmen, that he should create for himself a metaphysics, a politics, and a morality. He succumbed to all these burdens. Life did not appear to him in a shape with exactoutlines, with beautiful lights and dark shadows, with the concomitants of effort, joy, and sorrow, with a splendour of created things, with privileges of working, of feeling behind one a past that one may carry forward, and of being able to count even on the future. It was for him a dense fog, which his reason vainly tried to pierce, in which he heard the call neither of God, of race, nor of country. He did not see his own importance, which was not merely individual but collective, he did not understand that everyone’s duty is to recognise one’s own place, that everyone’s strength and profit are to be sought in the realities of existence on which he depends and which in their turn depend on him. And so he learned a new fear of living.

These modern young men have sisters. I will not venture to describe them. A Persian proverb warns us “not to strike a woman, even with a flower.” But the poets, who have every license, even against love, have taken on themselves the task of painting the portrait. Who does not recall the “Lines to a Dead Woman”?

“Yes, good she was—if ’twere enoughThat as she passed her hand would give,Without God seeing, saying aught,If gold without kind words be alms.“She thought—if a melodious voice,A soft and sweet, but empty sound,Like to the murmur of a stream,Be token of the thought behind.“She prayed—if beauty of two eyes,Which sometimes on the earth were fixed,Sometimes uplifted to the sky,Be worthy of the name of prayer.“She died, and yet she never lived;She only made pretence at life.The book fell idly from her hands,In which not one word had she read.”

“Yes, good she was—if ’twere enoughThat as she passed her hand would give,Without God seeing, saying aught,If gold without kind words be alms.

“Yes, good she was—if ’twere enough

That as she passed her hand would give,

Without God seeing, saying aught,

If gold without kind words be alms.

“She thought—if a melodious voice,A soft and sweet, but empty sound,Like to the murmur of a stream,Be token of the thought behind.

“She thought—if a melodious voice,

A soft and sweet, but empty sound,

Like to the murmur of a stream,

Be token of the thought behind.

“She prayed—if beauty of two eyes,Which sometimes on the earth were fixed,Sometimes uplifted to the sky,Be worthy of the name of prayer.

“She prayed—if beauty of two eyes,

Which sometimes on the earth were fixed,

Sometimes uplifted to the sky,

Be worthy of the name of prayer.

“She died, and yet she never lived;She only made pretence at life.The book fell idly from her hands,In which not one word had she read.”

“She died, and yet she never lived;

She only made pretence at life.

The book fell idly from her hands,

In which not one word had she read.”

“She only made a pretence at life.” How many die to-day who have never lived at all!

Even our health has suffered from the reaction of our moral weakness. Nervous illnesses, which for several years have been making such alarming progress, are nothing else than the result of disabled wills, of weakened personalities. Doctor Grasset, Professor in the Faculty of Medicine at Montpellier, who has gained universal renown by his special study of these diseases, clearly states the necessity of recourse to a moral treatment which consists in building up the personality and strengthening the will. “We must,” he says, “give a patient the desire and the ambition to cure himself, and with that purpose we must show him the object that life still holds for him, the mission that he still has to fulfil in this world.”

“A nervous subject, who does not understand life, who will not admit that life is worth the trouble of living, who goes to sleep at nightwithout wishing to think of the next day, with no satisfaction beyond that of having one day less to live ... this nervous subject will never be cured.

“The doctor must awaken and develop in his patient the ideas of duty, of sacrifice, of sociability. All these great thoughts must replace the morbid ones.

“The patient must be prevented from limiting himself to the fruitless brooding over a past which cannot be altered. Whatever are the injustices, apparent or real, of different lots, every man has before him a part to play, be it small or be it distinguished, in the interests of his fellow men and of humanity in general.

“We must, in other words, take the patient out of himself and turn him more and more towards altruism, by showing him that the cure lies there, and only there.

“A healthy man is an altruistic animal. Egotism and self-centredness are allied to disease; they are the causes and symptoms of disease. As long as one remains an egoist, one is not and cannot be cured.”

In order to appreciate the importance of such words, let us remember that they do not emanate from a theorist, but from an observer of innumerable facts. Such, then, is the physical danger of the fear ofliving, such is the psychic treatment of it.

There is yet another form of the fear of living. Here, it is true, there is no shrinking from effort, from trouble, or from battle. Next to passive selfishness it is necessary to drag into the light, as Apollo dragged Marsyas, that active egotism which is capable of displaying the utmost vigor, but only to satisfy an individual aim, that of one’s own pleasure. This puts to a wrong use our best weapon, which is energy. It claims to subordinate life to its will, to accept it only for what it is actually worth, and therefore it fears life.

Doubtless this curious form of cowardice has more to recommend it than the other, and attracts by a pretence of merit as the Sirens attracted by a pretence of love. Its motto might be the celebrated definition of Mérimée: “Life is a green table, which amuses us only when the stakes are high.” Its defiance of life sometimes becomes a defiance of death, and we cannot quite restrain ourselves from admiration when we see Don Juan—the most brilliant incarnation of this bold selfishness—the breaker of all oaths, the miserable corruptor of all the virtues, alone in the banqueting hall (where, though lights and flowers still suggesttriumphant joy, the terrified guests have all fled), to see him rise and go forth, torch in hand and sarcasm on his lips, to meet the statue of the Commander, whose embrace is to crush him.

This energy which demands violent pleasure is the energy of the bandit. It is quite possible to find praise for it. I find it, to the life, in one of those strange, suffocating novels wherein Madame Grazia Deledda truthfully depicts the manners of Sardinia. An old widow in the mountains, to dazzle the young Oli, sings the praises of her dead husband, the best and most devoted of men. “What did he do?” asks Oli. “Ah, he was a brigand.” And when the young girl is surprised at this answer, the widow tells that her husband became a brigand to show his bravery and to occupy the time which is so badly spent when one is idle. Was it not better than frequenting the inn? And in a lyrical strain she celebrates this life of enterprise. “They were,” she says, “brave and skilful, ready for everything, especially for death. You think, perhaps, that all these robbers are bad men? You are wrong, dear sister. They are the men who want to prove their bravery—nothing else. My husband used to say, ‘Once men went to the wars, but to-day there are no more wars and men still feel the need of fighting.’ That is why they go in for brigandage, plunder, and violent deeds, not to do harm,but to show their strength and courage in some way.”[1]

This is the case in business, in politics, in society, to some extent everywhere, with men, and even women, who in one way or another display their strength and courage. They are not necessarily bandits, but they all desire to get only joys, or at least violent sensations, out of life, and aim at throwing it away afterwards like a squeezed orange. These are the mad individualists who will not observe any measure in enjoyment, and see in the world only a personal inheritance to be wasted by them. I know them well, through having often myself looked in their direction with the fever of desire. Never has the possibility of a future life been so insolently rejected, and never have we, as some of us now do, exposed ourselves with such foolhardiness to all dangers of destruction, as though it were necessary to make a blaze of this, our only life, in order to discover in it some divine fire. We plunge it in the whirl-wind of death to increase its intensity for a few precarious moments.

Romanticism, by proclaiming the right to passion, the right to happiness, the right to freedom, encouraged the development of individual force. A new romanticism extols it to-day, and it is chiefly women who preach the gospel. Their invasion of contemporary literatureis only one symptom of a more general feminism. Less apt than man to grasp the complexity of social and moral life, the new woman exhausts all her demands in one cry and with a single leap lands at the road’s end to which she is led by confidence in her own powers and by her narrow view of the universe which centres wholly in self. At last individualism has found its philosopher in a poet, Nietzsche,—much misunderstood, by the way,—who grants to the Superman all rights. And why should one not believe in a Superman, especially if one is a modern woman?

But is it not rather curious to call that doctrine the fear of living which glorifies life and doubles its intensity?

I am reminded of a little story which used to be told to me when I was a child. It is the story of a ball of string that a fairy—good or bad—gave to a little boy with these mysterious words:

“This ball represents the length of your life. Each moment will shorten it. I have not the power to increase the time nor even to suspend it, but I have the power of shortening it, and that I give to you. Whenever in your life you come upon hours that are useless, sorrowful, or unpleasant, and wish to shorten them, pull the string and the hours will pass. Farewell and be wise.”

The little boy paid no heed to this prudent advice. He took the balllaughingly, and as he was merry he thought he would let the string shorten itself. Then he began to have wishes. At school he wished for holidays. He was ambitious; he desired to realise his ambitions. And to obtain the objects which he coveted, he pulled and pulled at the string. When he had finished the term of his life he perceived with consternation that he had scarcely lived a few days. Just so our desires would consume our days, if our days depended on our desires.

Thus our individualists whose energy seems to i be of a worthy sort have, on the contrary, a fear of living. They are afraid to live, since they do not wish to live their lives entirely and since, perverted by the abuse of violent sensations, they no longer understand, they fear ordinary life, which seems wearisome and dull to them.

Now this ordinary life plays an important part in the succession of our days. It is almost all the ball of string. To limit life to youth is not to understand it, is indeed to despise it. For it is all worth living, if only we know how to fill it.

Beyond the appetite for those passions which, through their very violence, their risks, their mischances, have a certain grandeur, I see among the symptoms of disease the search for, the need of, distraction. One meets to-day, especially in Paris among the wealthier classes—for poverty suppresses this ardor—men and women who seem toflee from themselves, so agitated are they. They confuse the meaning of agitation and action. It is a terrible confusion, which arose in society principally since the Eighteenth Century. That century began to disturb the springs of our inward life. The Duchess of Maine, as early as that, said that she had contracted “the love of a crowd.” We pass our time outside our homes, or we come back with a crowd, so as to avoid solitude for a single instant. We make out a programme every morning, so harassing that we should refuse to go through it if we were forced to do so. We must amuse ourselves, distract ourselves, forget ourselves. To withdraw within ourselves is to be bored when we have neither love nor faith nor definite aim. And we think we are living a great deal; which is the reason why so many Parisians, men and women, to whom a variety of spectacles and a feast of art are supposed to bring great intellectual development, have seen so much and have retained so little. Life for them is like a cinematograph picture which dazzles the eye and goes back into darkness. They have never worked for their impressions, and these are the only impressions which count.

Now that is not living, to be always “out”—like Madame Benoîton—“out” even to oneself, especially to oneself; any more than it is travelling, when one rushes over the high roads at full speed in amotor without once stopping. Life is not perpetual distraction, and here we have another form of the fear of living.

III

The first form confused cowardly passivity, reserve, and parsimony with courageous resignation, while this militant egotism confuses strength with its display. The only true energy is that which is ordered and disciplined.

We are born in a state of dependence. We depend on all kinds of particular conditions; conditions of country, race, family, environment, education, health, brains, fortune; for there are no men that are free, and herein lies our great equality. Besides, in the course of our life, we shall depend on circumstances which we shall be able neither to foresee nor to avoid. We must resolutely accept this dependence.

It is the chief of all heroisms. Not the heroism with the plumes and the flourish of trumpets, which individualism is willing to extol so as to raise the song of life to the major key; but an obscure heroism—the most difficult, for publicity is a great comfort—which must be sustained and manifested in the smallest things. That haughty individual, capable of heroic acts, shows himself, on coming down from his pedestal, perfectly unbearable and cowardly in the life which(let us not forget) is our daily life; while of another, apparently insignificant, we learn one day, often too late, that he has always been doing wonders. No life is devoid of opportunities to display merit; the thing is to seize these opportunities.

But if we are, in one part of our life, dependent, another part of our life, on the contrary, depends on us. There, our will and our energy can and must come into play. It is their task to increase in wealth, importance, and value the inheritance of our life, as cultivation increases the natural fruitfulness of the land.

Every life demands effort, no one is exempt from sorrow, very few are unacquainted with failure. Effort, sorrow, failure, are so many obstacles which bring out the extent of our merit. “In this life”—to quote President Roosevelt again—“we arrive at nothing without an effort. A healthy State can exist only if the men and women who compose it lead healthy, strong, clean lives; if the children be brought up in the right way, if they try to overcome difficulties, not to avoid them, if they do not seek comfort but know how to snatch triumph from pain and risk. Man must be happy to do man’s work, to dare and be adventurous and work to keep himself and those who depend on him. The wife must be the housekeeper, a companion to the founder of the home,a wise mother, who is not afraid of having many healthy children. In one of his powerful and melancholy books Daudet speaks of the ‘fear of maternity—the terror which haunts the young wife of the present day.’ When such words can be truly said about a nation, that nation is rotten to the core. When men fear work, or rightful war, when women fear maternity, they are trembling on the brink of damnation, and it would be a good thing if they vanished from the earth, where they are the just objects of scorn to all men and women who themselves are brave and high-souled.”[2]

This is the condemnation of idle wealth and inertia. And if the head of the young American nation thinks it necessary to utter such words to stir up the wills of so vigorous a people, how much the more bitter must their application be to our weary France? Over there they scarcely strike at any but the frantic egoists, whose energies it is more easy to direct into the right channels than it is to galvanise into action our fear and cowardice.

President Roosevelt has always made the distinction between material treasures and those moral treasures which give nations and individuals their vitality. In a letter to our Mistral, who had sent him a copy of “Mireille,” he explained this again with his usual clearness.“Industries and railways,” he wrote, “have their use up to a certain point, but courage and power of endurance, the love of our wives and children, the love of home and country, the love of the betrothed for one another, the love and imitation of heroism and sublime endeavors, the simple every-day virtues and the heroic ones,—these are the greatest virtues and if they are lacking, no accumulated wealth, no amount of ‘industrialism,’ however noisy and impressive, no feverish activity, under whatever form it may be shown, will be profitable either to the individual or to the nation. I am not despising the value of these things of the ‘body of the nation’; I merely desire that they should not make us forget that as well as a body there is also a soul.”

If endeavor should stimulate us, pain ought not to crush us. But do we not resist it less well nowadays? Physical pain, more especially, has become unbearable to us. We need sedatives for the smallest ailments, and we are sure that our candor will be applauded if we declare that violent toothache is more painful than any moral pain.

Moral pain is the indispensable complement of human life. Before suffering comes, life does not appear in its true colors, and the weakare not always distinguishable from the strong.

“The woods, cut down, more fair and green shall grow,” said old Ronsard. After all, life has its revenges. Even if it had not, we still ought not to be discouraged. Many faces turn away from failure and resent defeat, even in the case of others. That again is fear. One day a professor of literature, not devoid of irony, having finished a course of lectures on the “Iliad” to a class of young girls, asked his pupils which hero they preferred, Achilles or Hector. Achilles had an overwhelming majority. He was the conqueror. But Homer, more clear-sighted in his psychology, gave the conquered hero the nobler and more generous character, for he knew the share that the gods have in the success or failure of mankind. Our finest French epic, the “Chanson de Roland,” exalts courage under defeat.

Energy fits us to bear failure, pain, and effort. This fine quality needs discipline. Its character depends on the use that is made of it. To cultivate it for itself would be to imitate those people who make sport the aim of their existence. Sport maintains or increases our strength and our health, of which we have need in order to realise our life; but to take them for the actual realisation of life would only be grotesque. Nature develops itself blindly and lavishly. Everythingpertaining to the human sphere is subject to order. And, just as no work of art can be produced without submission to the laws of harmony, so there is no fine life without the acceptance of an order conditioned by our dependence and our limitations. But to regulate our energy is not to diminish it. On the contrary, it is to possess and manage it as a horseman his well-trained horse. “The Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence,” says the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, “and the violent take it by force.” Life itself suffers violence. The lukewarm and moderate natures have never created anything; the creative are the passionate ones who have tamed their passions.

In order to live all our life, it is important to accept it in the past, the present, and the future as well. In the past, this means to recognise a tradition. Neither nations nor individuals appear suddenly in the light of day. We must therefore recognise the ties which bind us to the country where we were born, to the race from which we have sprung. Thus we shall extend ourselves backwards and take to ourselves whatever there is, in the past, that still has life.

But to get inspiration from the past does not mean to identify oneself with it. “The life which tries to expand itself,” says Monseigneur Spalding, “eliminates dead things from it, and if you are a vivifying force, do not adopt the profession of grave-digger.” Nothing beginsover again and everything evolves. Everything evolves slowly and under the impulse of what has gone before. Every age has its own new needs, which must be understood. Ours makes great demands. More complex and more troublous, it requires clearer sight, plainer sense of responsibility, and more enlightened intelligence. The segregation of poverty helps to conceal its miseries; industrial and mechanical developments make work less personal, and specialisation destroys part of the joy in work. New conditions of life have sprung up, which need a new spirit of enterprise.

The future, revealed in the faces of our children, reminds us that our goal lies beyond us, and that even in the nightfall of our life we must prepare a shelter for our descendants. We do not build with the same materials if the house is to last but a few years as we do if it is to last for centuries.

We must not think that, in developing in ourselves the love of life—of the whole of life—we create a greater fear of death. Our life is not in proportion to its length. Very short lives often give out more perfume than long barren existences. The important thing is not to grow old, but to fill up all one’s days until the last, knowing well thatthe last will come and give to our life its finished form. For the acceptance of the whole of life includes the acceptance of death.

Figaroopened recently a rather curious discussion among the doctors, which must interest all of us, since it is true that we all must die. It inquired of a certain number of “princes of science,” members of the Academy of Medicine, professors of faculties, eminent surgeons and practitioners, all men with degrees and honors, concerning the following case. A doctor is attending a patient, and finds that the illness is incurable, that the end is only a question of months, of days, or of hours. Must he say so? Must he tell the patient himself, or only the family, and in the latter case, which member of it?

The answers were almost all the same. They might have borrowed the epigram from Pascal: “Men, not being able to cure death, poverty, or ignorance, imagine they can make themselves happy, by not thinking about them; that is the only consolation they have been able to discover for so many ills.” Our doctors, unable to do away with death, think they can do away with the thought of it. They chloroform us morally, in preparation for the operation of the Fates.

There are some very timorous writers who will not even allow the subject to be discussed. They think it irritates their readers and so push it aside with all their strength. Or else they take shelterbehind their conscience, which is presumably the only judge of their actions. But the greater part of them have an opinion. They invoke humanity as if it were some new god, who requires lies and demands cowardice. “Nothing must be told the patient which is not cheering,” one of them informs us. “It is charitable to leave a light of hope till the very end,” says a second. A third expounds this maxim: “It is no one’s duty or right to tell a patient that he is lost.” And M. Vaulair, a professor of the University of Liège, declares that when the science of medicine is powerless, its most pressing duty is to give the unhappy one who believes in it the help of a lie. All except one are agreed in maintaining that the patient, the principal person interested, has no right to hear the truth.

Must this truth be told to the family circle? Yes, up to a certain point. One must try to avoid giving pain to a wife, to children, to a father or a mother, who might be overwhelmed by the blow. Tact, prudence, reserve, moderation, hints, counsels, allusions, such are the varied stock-in-trade of the doctor in a case of this kind. He chooses a distant relative, strong and courageous, to whom he gently breaks the news, so as to make sure that he will not succumb to the shock. This relative can do what he likes about the matter. There is nothing moreto be said; the family has been warned. A brave man knows the secret, it will be well kept. The doctor is the sole judge in the choice of this confidant. The important thing is that it must not be a near relative, who might be frightened. These doctors are tactful people. We believed them armed against grief, impassive, indifferent, brutal. How mistaken we were about them! What apologies we owe them! They are as gentle as little girls, as compassionate as sisters of mercy. They could not inflict pain without suffering themselves. And when the patient is dying they look for the most distant relative, the hardest and toughest, to confide to him stealthily that a mortal man is about to die.

Thus life will come to a painless end. Is not everything preferable to the terror inspired by death? Everything? Not quite. Certain doctors think that we may well allow a poor old man to die who is of no use to anyone, without telling him; but when they think of the head of a great business or of one of those capitalists who manage some huge concern, they are quite out of countenance. You see, the case becomes serious. What is to happen to all this vast business? What is to be the future of all this capital? Must we not “assure the interests of the heirs”? Yes, the importance of such material things justifies torturing the dying man. In his last moment he must pay for the importance he hasenjoyed on earth. They will make him understand that he alone has no right to die quietly and is doomed to be worried till he has made his will, divided his goods, settled the fate of his business. Afterwards they may give him some hope, on condition that he does not use it to destroy what he has just done.

But who is really deceived? What is this comedy that they pretend to play round deathbeds? Do we not know, that some day we must die? Does not this certainty of death impart to life a peculiar significance? Can this be destroyed by not thinking about it? “Really,” M. Brunetière wrote recently, dealing with the subject of the “Falsehood of Universal Peace,” “life is not the greatest good if the foundation of all morality is that many things must be preferred to life; and really death is not the greatest evil, if we are men, so to speak, only in so fair as we rise above the fear of death.”

Our early youth, for which death scarcely exists, knows nothing of the value of days. It thinks our strength inexhaustible and squanders it idly. When we begin to see, around us and in us, the charm and the sadness of transient things, we feel life in all its fulness because we are amazed at the incessant flight of time. Our days are numbered. But the divisions of time are purely conventional. How many days do welose when again the fervor of life concentrates itself in a few minutes of consciousness? The last minutes that we are destined to live may be the most intense. They may become an important part of our existence if we know that they are the last. They have this tremendous power of summing up in themselves all our past days, of completing the design of our life, of defining its outlines, and sometimes of revealing them for the first time. They bring us the supreme opportunity to correct our faults, to perform the most imperative duties which we have forgotten, to mark the current of our thoughts which has been running to waste in our ordinary pursuits. What right has anyone to steal these minutes from us? It is indeed to steal them, if they are left to us, stripped of their real importance. The man who is about to die should act like a man who is about to die, not as a man who has plenty of time left. You think, you doctors, to soothe him by hiding his danger from him; you take away from him a part of his life whose importance could never be measured in duration. He will waste his remaining strength, if he has kept his mind intact, in guessing at the truth, in scrutinising the blank faces around him, in questioning the throbs of his pulse, the beating of his heart. He will be a prey to all the terrors of doubt, when he has the right to finish his life by preparing for death. Bywhat right do you still decree that the question of his bequest alone shall occupy him? What do you know of his thoughts, of his soul, of the future life, of God? Who has solved these questions? And if you have solved them for yourselves, where do you find the authority to solve them for others? Do not take useless responsibilities on yourselves. Everyone has his own, and that is sufficient. It is not for you to set yourselves up as judges, to ask if the dying man has any affairs to settle—he may have some of which you know nothing—you have no right to choose your confidant, and to be inhuman and cruel. For it is not human to injure life by deforming it, and it does deform it to banish from it all thought of death, which gives it all its significance. A beautiful death is the indispensable complement of a beautiful life, and the ransom of a wicked one. Yes, we must raise ourselves above the fear of death, and for that we must begin to see life as it is, so that we may live bravely, fully, nobly. The fear of death is one with the fear of living, which makes us shrink from the great efforts, the boldness, and the sacrifices that life demands from us. Only one of all these doctors understood this, and that was Sir John Fayrer, a member of the Royal Society of London, and head of the Sanitary Department in India, who dared to say, in the midst of a flock of his colleaguesbleating with fear: “An experience of more than sixty years makes me declare very clearly to you: I do not agree that death should surprise a patient; he should be prepared for it.”

Life is, after all, such a precious thing that one must neither reject it entirely like those lazy egoists, who soften and contract it to such a degree that it loses all its value; nor partly reject it like those vigorous egoists, who claim to subordinate it to their choice.

The very act of opening one’s eyes to the light of day involves a debt of gratitude to those who have permitted us to see it. Formerly in the French family there was no doubt as to the goodness of life. The old French family wrote its own story in its “commonplace books.” These commonplace books were humble volumes of accounts, but it soon became the custom to jot down, besides the record of expenditure, the most important facts of private life, such as marriages, deaths, births. Then there were added a few reflections, which sufficed to express a whole range of feeling, a complete conception of life. We have a great number of these books. They recall the time of our fathers and speak to us with the majesty of a last will and testament. It is the gospel ofthe wise. And it preaches faith in life to those who are inspired by their fathers and are content to be worthy successors to them.

Though one should run through them all, one would not find a single denial of the goodness of life. These workmen, farmers, merchants, always welcome a new-born child with an expression of joy, even if he comes after many others. The forms of baptism are all acts of faith like the one that I came across in the book of Pagès, a merchant of Amiens, who is celebrating the birth of a ninth child: “The divine goodness, continuing to shed its blessings on our marriage, has favored us with the birth of a son.” In the same way, the domestic diary of Joseph de Sudre, of Avignon, is the story—I should say, the epic—of his efforts, his privations, his savings, in order to be able to bring up his numerous offspring. In spite of adverse circumstances and bad harvests, he neglects nothing that contributes to that end. The old French language used only one word to describe the maternal feeding and moral education of the child. It was the verbnourrir, to “bring up,” which we have degraded. Our Joseph de Sudre loses his son, a captain in the King’s service, a man of great promise. After his short and pathetic funeral speech he adds; “I have suffered poverty for him with joy.”

Faith in the goodness of life, acceptance of all its burdens, confidence in the future, were formerly the code of the French family. Since Jean Jacques Rousseau we have replaced belief in the goodness of life by faith in the innate goodness of man. It does not produce the same results.

If now we ask those geniuses who represent the highest achievements of humanity what we ought to think about life, how would they answer us? The great minds in art, literature, and history, are only great when they animate us, when they quicken the movement of our blood and stir our resolution. They realise for us the changing beauty of the world and the transient charm of our days. No artist is great without unlimited love of life. I will quote only one example, the most touching; that of Beethoven. Financial worries, family troubles, a most cruel malady—that deafness which shut him up within himself—moral loneliness, unrealised love, such was the record of his life. A weak soul would have given way to despair. From the depth of all his distress he undertook to celebrate joy, and he did so in his Ninth Symphony.

It is told of him that once, visiting a lady who had just lost her son and not finding words both strong and gentle enough to express his sympathy, he sat down at the piano and played. He played a songof sorrow, but a song of hope also. Thus in our suffering the great masters of art come to our help.

In the lives of great men we can learn courage and the taste for life. There is no reading more consoling, and I quite understand the influence exercised by Plutarch. I wish that biographies of the great men of France, well written, concise and vigorous, were recommended to be read, particularly by our young men. They would incite them to live well. They give us constant occasion to compare our empty days with those well-filled lives, and then we bewail our inaction, our idleness, the pettiness of our lot, which we do not know how to enlarge.

In the life of La Play, that admirable defender of the French family, I lately read this anecdote. He had just recovered from a serious illness, which had brought him to the brink of the grave and the course of which he had traced with his usual clearness. After his recovery, when he was asked what thoughts the feeling of his approaching end had provoked in him, he replied in these memorable words, which may serve me as a conclusion:

“From the brink of the grave I measured, not the vanity of life, but its importance.”

H. B.

April and September, 1905.

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