TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES

In the plain text version words in Italics are denoted by _underscores_.

The book cover was modified by the Transcriber and has been added to the public domain.

A number of words in this book have both hyphenated and non-hyphenated variants. For the words with both variants present the one more used has been kept.

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THE HEART’S DOMAIN

BY GEORGES DUHAMEL

Author of “Civilization, 1914-1917,” etc.

TRANSLATED BY
ELEANOR STIMSON BROOKS

NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1919

Copyright, 1919, by
The Century Co.

Published, September, 1919

TO
MY SON BERNARD

PREFACE

I am beginning a book with what sounds like a very ambitious title.

I wish to say at once that I have no qualifications to discuss political, historical or economic matters. I leave to the scholars who are versed in these redoubtable questions the task of explaining, skilfully and definitely, the great misery that has befallen our time.

I thus at the same time renounce most of the opportunities and obligations of my title.

But I wish, with all my heart, to pursue with a few people of good will a friendly discussion the object of which remains, in spite of all, the heart’s domain, or the possession of the world.

The possession of the world is not decided by guns. It is the noble work of peace. It is not involved in the struggle which is now rending society.

Even so, men will find themselves engaged in an undertaking that will threaten to overwhelm them with suffering and despair.

Fate has assigned to me during the war a place and a task of such a character that misery has been the only thing I have seen; it has been my study and my enemy every moment. I must be forgiven for thinking of it with a persistence that is like an obsession.

The whole intelligence of the world is absorbed by the enterprise and the necessities of the war; there is little chance of rousing it now from this in favor of the happiness of the race, in favor of that happiness which is compromised for the future and destroyed for the present. It is to the heart one must address oneself. It is to all the generous hearts that one must make one’s appeal.

So, if I am spurred by an ambition, it is to beg the world to seek once more whatever can lighten the present and the future distress of mankind, to seek the springs of interest that exist for the soul in a life harassed with difficulties, perils and disillusionments, to honor more than ever the faithful and incorruptible resources of the inner life.

The inner life!

It has never ceased to shine, a precious, quivering flame, devoting all its ardor in a struggle against the breath of these great events, resisting this tempest which has had no parallel.

It has never ceased to shine, but its shy and faithful light trembles in a sort of crypt into which we fear to venture.

What has happened has seized upon us as upon its prey. During the first months of the war, during the first years perhaps, all our physical and moral energies were overwhelmed in this maelstrom. How, indeed, could one refuse oneself to the appetite of the monster? We did not even try to snatch from him our hours of leisure, our dreams. We simply abandoned such things, as we abandoned our plans, our welfare, and the whole of our existence.

You remember! It was a time when solitude found us more shaken, more disarmed, than peril. We reproached ourselves for distracting a single one of our thoughts from the universal distress. We gave ourselves day and night to this agonizing world; and when our work was suspended, when the wild beast unloosed its clutch, as if in play, and we returned for a few minutes to ourselves, we did not always dare to look the quivering inner flame in the face. What it lighted up in us seemed at times too foreign to our anxiety, or too filled with limpid serenity. And so we returned to our wretchedness, experiencing it to the point of intoxication, to the point of despair.

When I think of the year 1915, it seems to me that I still hear all those noble comrades saying to me with a sort of dejection: “I can’t think of anything else! I can neither read, nor work, nor seek to distract myself to any purpose. When I’m off duty I think about these days, I think about them unceasingly, till I feel seasick, till I feel dizzy. I’ve just had two hours of liberty. Once upon a time I should have given them to Pascal or to Tolstoy. Today I have employed them in reading some documentary works on the manufacture of torpedoes and on European colonial methods. They are subjects that will always be outside my line, subjects I shall never be interested in. But how can I think of anything else?”

Perhaps it is not a question of thinking of anything else. It is not a question of turning one’s back on the time, but rather of looking it in the face, calmly and collectedly.

When the first great excitement had passed away, those who had the wisdom and the courage to return assiduously to themselves found their inner life ennobled, augmented, enriched. For it does not cease to labor on in the depths of us. It is at once ourselves and something other than ourselves, better than ourselves. Like certain of our organs which are endowed with a marvelous independence and pursue a vigilant activity in the midst of our agitations and our sleep, the inner life comes to its fruitage even though we are full of ingratitude and indifference towards it. It is the faithful spouse who keeps the home radiant, arranges every comfort and spins at the wheel, behind the door, awaiting our return.

And behold we are returning!

To be sure, the storm still roars on. It grows greater, more furious, more unending. Never has it seemed more complex, more grave, more difficult. Peril has taken up its abode with us. Every sort of opinion holds up its head and vehemently solicits our belief.

But we have found once more the key and the path to the secret refuge. Nothing could turn us aside now. Nothing could prevent us at certain hours from plunging into solitude, there to find again the equilibrium, the harmony and those moral riches which we know, after the ruin of so many things, are alone efficacious, alone durable.

For long months now I have realized, watching the men with whom I live, that they are waiting for words of quietude, words of rest and love. They are like parched soil at the end of a blazing summer: they long to slake their thirst and grow green again.

In vain have destruction, disorder and death tried to break up the sublime and familiar colloquy that every being pursues with the better part of himself. That colloquy revives, it begins again, in the very midst of the battle, among the odors and the groans of the hospital.

Nevertheless, the daily work is done, well done; duty is properly weighed and accomplished; the soul simply is unwilling any longer to renounce its meditation upon all that is profound, imperishable, and immaterial in the present.

Tell me that we are going to labor in concert once more at the exploitation of our inner fortune. Tell me that we are going to labor to save from shipwreck that part of us which, in spite of all our errors, uncertainties, crimes and disillusionments, remains truly noble and worthy of eternity.

I am able to undertake this essay thanks to the leisure moments the war has been willing to grant me. It is not purely the fruit of solitary meditations. I do not live alone: my chosen comrades surround me; they share with me the confused space of our dwelling; we share together all the thoughts that fill this space.

Friendship has accomplished the miracle of transforming into a communion what, without it, would have remained a promiscuity.

I have a feeling that I am expressing the desires and the thoughts of many men. Very soon, those who are here will be going to sleep; I shall continue my writing, but with the secret certitude of not being alone in the task, of carrying with me their tacit assent. I feel that I have been entrusted with a sort of mandate.

I have no library, no documents. But do we need books in order to converse together of the things that form the very substance of our existence? Does it not suffice to consult our souls? Do we need any other guarantee than our devout desire in order to lift an open hand and make, for all those who await it in their solitude, the sign of concord and of hope?

CONTENTS

THE HEART’S DOMAIN

THE HEART’S DOMAIN

I
THE HOPE OF HAPPINESS

I

It was necessary for me to pass middle age in order to become convinced that happiness was the object of my life, as it is the object of all humanity, as it is the object of the whole world of living things.

At first sight, that statement seems self-evident. And yet many a time have I questioned my friends, my relatives, my chance companions on this subject and I have received the most contradictory replies.

Many seemed taken unawares and, overwhelmed with their various burdens, would not trouble to seek an object: they were in pursuit of happiness without naming it. Others, excited by the play of argument, acknowledged as the object of life all sorts of states or manners of being which are nothing but steps toward happiness, means good or bad of seeking it, such as movement, stoical indifference, or prayer. Others confused the end with the object and named death. Still others, maddened by their misery, gave it as their bitter conclusion that unhappiness is the actual destiny of man, and these confused the obstacle with the aim. Finally, there were some who gave to happiness names dictated by their aspirations, their culture, their accustomed manner of using words, and called it God, or eternal life, or the salvation of the soul.

As for me, in spite of all, I am sure that happiness is the object of life. This certitude has come to me altogether from within, not from outside events, and not from the spectacle of other men. Like all the certitudes of the inner life, it is obstinate and even aggressive. All objections seem simply made to fortify it. It dominates them all. I have not been able even to imagine a new certitude that could invalidate or replace this one.

Upon reflection, the path and the end are identical. Happiness is not only the aim, the reason of life, it is its means, its expression, its essence. It is life itself.

II

One might well doubt this. The whole of humanity at this moment utters one despairing, heart-rending cry. It bellows like a wounded beast of burden, it simply does not understand its wound.

All convictions and all certitudes are at one another’s throats. How can we recognize them, with that lost look they have, that blood that soils and disfigures them? In the hurricane, opinions, uprooted, have lost their soil and their sap. They drift like autumn thistles, dry thistles that yet have power to tear the skin. Men no longer know anything but their insurmountable suffering, a suffering that has no limit and seems to be without reason. They groan and desire nothing but to be alleviated. Will a century of pious tenderness suffice to bathe, drain, close the vast wound?

Without delay, O streaming wound, your living flesh must be stanched and bathed. From now on, no matter how long you bleed, you must be anointed and protected, and if you are opened up again ten times, ten times must you be anointed anew and covered once more.

Yet, do not doubt it, humanity even in this terrible hour seeks for nothing but its own happiness. It rushes forward, by instinct, like a herd that smells the salt-lick and the spring. But it will suffocate rather than not enjoy everything together and at once.

Happiness?

God! who has given it this painful and ridiculous idea? What were they about, the priests, the scientists, and the people who write the books? What has been taught the children of men that they could have been made to believe that war brings happiness to anyone? Let them declare themselves, those who have assured the poor in spirit that their happiness depends upon the possession of a province, an iron-mine, or a foaming arm of the sea between two distant continents!

It is thus that they have all set out for the conquest of happiness, since that is destiny, and there has been placed in their hands precisely what was certain to destroy happiness forever.

And yet, if you will bear with me, we need not lose all hope. So long as there is a single wall-flower to tremble in the coming Aprils over the ruins of the world, let us repeat from the depths of our hearts: “Happiness, you are truly my end and the reason for my being, I know it through my own tears.”

III

I went, lately, to a laboratory, in the heart of a wilderness of glass and porcelain, haunted with inhuman odors. A friend dwelt there. I saw a great crystal cask full of distilled water; the sunlight quivered through it freely and majestically. There, I thought, is the desert. That water contained nothing, it was unfitted for life, it was as empty as a dead world.

But then we scratched the bottom of the cask and looked at it with the microscope. Little round, green algæ were growing in that desert. A current of air had carried the germs, and they had increased and multiplied. There where there was nothing to seize upon, they had yet found something. The taste of barren glass, a few stray grains of dust, that soulless water, that sunlight, they had asked for nothing more in order to subsist and work out their humble joy.

I thought of this virtue of life, this perseverance, as of a hymn to happiness, a silent hymn prevailing over the roars of the conquest.

Nothing discourages life except, perhaps, the excess of itself.

If Europe, too rich and too beautiful, is to be henceforth the vessel of all the sorrows, it is because happiness has assumed an unclean mask: the mask of pleasure. For pleasure is not joy.

Patience! The whole world has not been poisoned.

I know of mosses that succeed in living upon acids. The antiseptics, whose property it is to destroy living things, are at times invaded by these obstinate fungi which encamp there, acclimatize themselves and modestly fulfil their destiny.

One must have confidence in happiness. One must have more confidence than ever, for never was happiness more greatly lacking to the mass of men. So cruelly is the world astray, so immensely, so evidently, too, that we cannot wait for the consummation to denounce it and reprove it.

Like those algæ, those mosses, those laborious lichens that attach to the very ruins themselves their infinite need of happiness, let us seek our joy in the distress of the present and make it open for us, like a plant beaten by the winds, in the desert of a blasted world.

IV

You must understand that this concerns happiness and not pleasure, or well-being, or enjoyment, or the delight of the senses.

All cultivated people have created different words to designate these different things. All have committed their moralists to the task of preserving simple souls from a confusion which our instincts favor.

Delight of the senses, you who are the eternally unsatisfactory, is it true, intangible one, that you will always deceive us and that we shall always seek for happiness through you?

What seductiveness is not yours, O you who smile with the lips of love, O mysterious phantom of joy? How you lure us and enchain us! Well you know how to array yourself, at times, in the appearance of a sacred mission, a religious duty!

No, you are not happiness, divine though you are! To live without you is a bitter misfortune, but you are not happiness!

Why does happiness command us to sacrifice you often, to mistrust you always?

There is no happiness without harmony; you know this very well, you who are delicious disorder itself, death, laughter, strife.

Happiness is our homeland. You are only the burning country we long for, the tropical isle where our dreams exile themselves, never to return.

Happiness is our true kingdom. Delight of the senses, let your slaves hymn your praise.

V

During the summer of 1916 I found among the meadows of the Marne a flower that had three odors. It is a very common flower in France: it adorns a low and spiny plant which the peasants call “arrête-bœuf.” Toward midday, at the hour when the sun exasperates all its creatures, this flower exhales three different odors: the first is soft, fresh and resembles the perfume of the sweet pea; the second is sharp and makes one think of phosphor irritant, of a flame; the third is the secret breath of love. This miraculous flower really has all three of these odors at once, but we perceive them more easily one at a time because we are not worthy of all this wealth.

This little discovery descended upon my weary head like a benediction. At that time we were leaving the miseries of Verdun behind and were just on the point of plunging into those of the Somme. The intermediate rest depressed us and enervated us by turns. In the walks across the fields which we took with our comrades, I grew accustomed every day to gather a root of arrête-bœuf and offer it, as a gift, to those who accompanied me, so that they might share my discovery.

Some of them, anxious about the world and their own fortune, took pleasure in this modest marvel. They breathed in with these perfumes the inexhaustible variety of the lavish universe. They distinguished and recognized, smilingly, the three odors of this one being. They honored these three ambassadors whom a people of unknown virtues had assigned to them. They interpreted as a revelation the little signs of the latent opulence which challenges and disdains the majority of bewildered men.

But others remained insensible to this delicate prayer, and these I thought of with chagrin as of men who had no care for the welfare of their own souls.

I know quite well you will say, “There is no relation between this flower and the welfare of the soul.” But this relation does exist, emphatically and definitely. Truth shines out of every merest trifle that goes to make up the world. We must fasten our eyes ardently upon it, as if it were a light shining through the branches, and march forward.

I am sure, we are all sure, that happiness is the very reason for our existence. Let it be added at once that happiness is founded upon possession, that is to say, upon the perfect and profound understanding of something.

For this reason men who have a high conception of happiness aspire to the complete and definite knowledge of an absolute, a perfection which they name God. The desire for eternal life is a boundless need of possession.

Equally noble is the passionate desire of certain men to understand, to possess themselves, to have such an exact and merciless conception of their moral and physical nature as will give them some sort of mastery over it.

It is indeed a beautiful destiny to pursue the understanding of the external world with the weapons and the arguments of a science that is not the slave of conquest. Men who achieve this may indeed be called just.

Others wish to possess a house, a field, a pair of earrings, an automobile. For them possession is not understanding, it is above all else an exclusive and almost solitary enjoyment. They deceive themselves about happiness and about possession. They deceive themselves to the actual point of war, massacre and destruction.

If we wish it, we may possess the whole universe, and it is in this possession that we shall find the salvation of our souls. We may possess, for example, that unknown something which walks by the road-side, the color of the forest of pointed firs that rises sharply against the southern horizon, the thoughts of Beethoven, our dreams by night, the conception of space, our memories, our future, the odor and the weight of objects, our grief at this moment and thousands and thousands of other things besides.

Is my soul immortal? Alas! how can I still linger in this ancient, ingenuous hope? There are millions who, like me, can no longer give reasonable credence to such an impossible happiness.

But does my soul exist? Every thought bears witness that it does, and this life of ours too, and the inexplicable life that is all about us.

When Christians speak of the salvation of the soul, they are thinking of all sorts of assurances and precautions in regard to that future life which remains the greatest charm of religion and at the same time its most wonderful weapon.

We can give a humbler but more immediate meaning to this expression.

First of all, not to be ignorant of our own souls!

To think about the soul, to think about it at least once in the confusion of every crowded day, is indeed the beginning of salvation.

To think with perseverance and respect of the soul, to enrich it unceasingly, that will be our sanctity.

VI

We have all known those men who, at the first break of day, while they are still half awake and barely rested, fling themselves into the stress of business. They pass all day from one man to another in a sort of blind, buzzing frenzy. They are ceaselessly reaching out to take, to appropriate for themselves. If a moment of solitude offers itself, they pull note-books out of their pockets and begin figuring. Between whiles they eat, drink and seek a sort of sleep that is more arid than death. Looking at these unfortunates, who are often men of great importance, one would imagine their souls were like decrepit poor relations, relegated to some corner of their personality, with which they never concern themselves.

I was once returning from the country on a train with a young surgeon on whom that cruel fortune which we call success was beginning to smile. I can still see him, breathless and almost stupefied, on the seat facing me. He had been talking to me of his work, of how he spent his time, with a restless excitement which the noise of the train hammered and disjointed and gave a sort of rhythm to. Evening was falling. It gave me pleasure to look at the young poplars in the valley beside the track, their foliage and slender trunks transfigured by the sunset. My friend looked at them also, and suddenly he murmured: “It’s true! I’m no longer interested in those things, I no longer pay attention to anything.” Through the fatigue and anxiety of his affairs, through the jingling calculation of his profits, he suddenly caught a glimpse of his error, of his real poverty. His repudiated soul stirred in the depths of his being as the infant stirs in its mother’s womb.

It is constantly awakening in this way and timidly reclaiming its rights. Often, an unexpected word strikes us, a word that comes from it and reveals it. I have as a work-fellow a quiet, studious young man who takes life “seriously,” that is to say, in such a fashion that he gets himself into a fine state of mind and will die, perhaps, without having known, without having saved, the soul with which he is charged. At the beginning of the month of June of this year 1918, I found myself hard at work during one of those overwhelming afternoons that seem, on our barren Champagne, like a white furnace, a glistening desert. There were many wounded and the greater part had been uncared for for several days; the barrack that served us as an operating-hall was overcrowded; our task was a tragic one; the demon of war had imprisoned us under his knee. We felt crushed, exasperated, swamped in these immediate realities. Between two wounded men, as I was soaping my gloves, I saw my young comrade looking far away through a little window and his gaze was suddenly bathed with calm and peace. “What are you looking at?” I said to him. “Oh! nothing,” he replied; “only I’m resting myself on that little tuft of verdure down there: it refreshes me so much.”

VII

It seems childish and paradoxical to oppose to all the concrete and formidable realities that are considered as the hereditary wealth of mankind an almost purely ideal world of joys that have no price, that remain outside all our bargainings, that are unstable, often fugitive, and always relative in appearance, whenever we put them to the test. Yet they alone are absolute, they alone are true. Where they are lacking there may be a place for amusement, there is no place for true happiness. They alone are capable of assuring the salvation of the soul. We ought to labor passionately to find them, to amass them as the veritable treasures of humanity.

The future we are permitted to glimpse seems the very negation of happiness and the ruin of the soul.

If this is true, we must examine it with open minds and then, with all our strength, refuse it.

Just this moment, when the struggle for mastery goes on, to the great peril of the soul, among the peoples, just this moment I choose for saying: “Let us think of the salvation of our souls.” And this salvation is not a matter of the future but of the present hour. Let us recognize the existence of the soul; it is thus that we shall save it. Let us give it the freedom of the city in a world where everything conspires to silence or destroy it. If it is true that this withdraws us from that struggle for existence, the clamor of which assails our ears, well, even so, I believe it is better to die than to remain in a universe from which the soul is banished. But we shall have occasion to speak more than once of this.

Let us not forget that happiness is our one aim. Happiness is, above all, a thing of the spirit, and we shall only deserve it at the price of the honors we render to the noblest part of our being.

VIII

There are people who have said to me, “My happiness lies in this very hurly-burly, this brutish labor, this frantic agitation which you spurn. Outside this turmoil of business and society, I am bored. I need it. I need it in order to divert my thoughts.”

No doubt! No doubt! But what have you done with your life that it has become necessary to divert your thoughts? What have you made of your past, what do you hope from your future when this alcohol, this opium, has become necessary to you?

You must understand me, there is no question, if you are built as an athlete, of letting your muscles deteriorate. There is no question, if you have a great thirst for controversy, a natural aptitude for struggle, of letting that thirst go unsatisfied, that aptitude uncultivated. The question is simply one of harmoniously employing all these fine gifts, of enriching yourself with those real treasures the universe bestows on those who wish to take them, and not of wearing out your radiant strength in the labors of a street-porter, a galley-slave or an executioner.

Here is a man who says to me: “My happiness! My happiness! But it consists in never thinking of my soul.” What a sad thing! And how gravely one must have offended others and one’s own self to have reached that point!

For where shall he who loves torment, passionate restlessness, uncertainty, and remorse discover these terrible blessings if it is not in the depths of his own hateful ego?

IX

If anyone tells you something strange about the world, something you have never heard before, do not laugh but listen attentively; make him repeat it, make him explain it: no doubt there is something there worth taking hold of.

The cult of the soul is a perpetual discovery of itself and the universe which it reflects. The purest happiness is not a stable and final frame of mind, it is an equilibrium produced by an incessant compromise which has to be adroitly reëstablished; it is the reward of a constant activity; it increases in proportion to the daily corrections one brings to it.

One must not cling obstinately to one’s own interpretations of the world but unceasingly renew the flowers on the altar.

In quite another order of ideas I think of those old-fashioned manufacturers who are immovably set against trying any of the new machines and perish in their stubbornness. That is nothing but a comparison: to justify the machine folly is quite the opposite of my desire. I simply wish to show that routine affects equally the things of the mind and of the heart, that it is a very formidable thing.

Kipling, I believe, tells the story of a Hindu colony that was decimated by famine. The poor folk let themselves die of hunger without touching the wheat that had been brought for them, because they had been used to eating millet.

If the sacred lamp of happiness some day comes to lack the ritual oil, we shall not let it go out; we shall surely find something with which to feed it, something that will serve for light and heat.

X

The will to happiness attains its perfection in the mature man. With adolescence it passes through a redoubtable crisis.

Nietzsche says: “There is less melancholy in the mature man than in the young man.” It is true.

Very young people cultivate sadness as something noble. They do not readily forgive themselves for not being always sad. They have discovered the mysterious isle of melancholy and do not wish to escape from it again. They love everything about that black magician and his attitudes and his tears and his nostalgia and his romantic beauty. They have a fierce disdain for vulgar pleasures and take refuge in sadness because they do not yet know the splendor and majesty of joy.

But in their own fashion, which is full of disdain, reserve and ingenuous complexity, they do not any the less seek for happiness.

With age happiness appears as truly the sole, serene study of man. As he rests upon the moral possession of the world, he believes that with time and experience he can remain insensible to the wearing out of his bodily organs.

He who knows how to be happy and to win forgiveness for his happiness, how enviable he is!—the only true model among those that are wise.

It is now, just now, that these things ought to be said, in the hour when our old continent bleeds in every member, in the hour when our future seems blotted out by the menace of every sort of servitude and of a hopeless labor that will know neither measure nor redemption.

II
POVERTY AND RICHES

I

The Christian doctrine, which has all the beauties, has all the audacities too. It has endeavored to make the sublime and daring notion prevail among the mass of men that salvation is reserved for the poor. What a magnificent thing! And if this religion of poverty has degenerated in the course of the centuries, with what consolation has it not bathed those thrice-happy souls whom an unbroken faith guides through misery and humiliation!

But there has never been a religion which has been able to found itself upon renunciation without compensation. Is he poor, this man who consents to go unclad, roofless, unfed, up to the day when there will be showered upon him all the riches of the kingdom of God? Has he no thought of a supreme gift, of a magnificent possession, the man to whom his master, in person, has given the command: “Lay up your treasures in heaven, where they will not be lost”?

He does not exist, the hopeless being who does not hunger for some treasure, even if it is an imaginary one, even an unreal one, even one that is lost in a bewildering future.

In what an abyss of poverty should we groan if our kingdom were not of this world and were nowhere outside the world, either?

And now a generation of men has come that no longer believes in the supernatural felicities of the future life and seems no longer to have anything to hope from a world consumed by hatred and given over inevitably, for long years, to confusion, destitution, egotistical passions.

In truth, the programmes of the social factions have no consolation for us, there is nothing in them that speaks of love and the true blessings; all these monuments of eloquence bring us back to hatred and anguish.

The most generous of them only give us glimpses of new struggles, new sheddings of blood, when our age is drunk with crime and fatigue. To whichever side the individual turns he finds himself crushed, scoffed at, sacrificed to insatiable, hostile gods.

A few years ago Maeterlinck wrote: “Up to the present men have left one religion to enter another; but when we abandon ours, it is not to go anywhere. That is a new phenomenon, with unknown consequences, in the midst of which we live.”

Having quoted these words, I hasten to add that the war is no particular consequence of this moral state of the world. The question of religion is not involved at all. The priests are quite ready to abuse these easy oppositions in order to obtain arguments in favor of their cause. But they know well enough, alas! that if the teaching of Christ stigmatizes wars, the religions have only contributed to multiply and aggravate them. They know very well that, in the conflict that now divides the earth, the religions have shown themselves enslaved to the states. No one has wished to take up the wallet and staff of the dead Tolstoy.

Humanity seems poorer and more truly disinherited than ever. Its kingdom is in itself and in everything that surrounds it; but it has sold it for a morsel of bread. And how can one reproach it for this? It is very hungry and its heart is not open to beauty.

II

We shall seek together the materials of our happiness. Together we shall pile up all those marvelous little things that must constitute our patrimony, our wealth.

We shall have great misfortunes and we shall often be bitterly deceived. It is because the war has succeeded in depriving the simplest and the most sacred things of the light of eternity. That is not the least consequence of the catastrophe. We must make a painful effort to recover that light and clear it of its blemishes. Silence, solitude, the sky, the vestiture of the earth, all the riches of the poor have been sullied as if forever. The works of art have been mutilated. They have taken refuge under the earth where they seem to veil their faces.

We ought to seek and gather together the debris so that we can take up and love in secret every day the fragments of our liberties.

We ought to think unceasingly of that “mean landscape” of which Charles Vildrac has spoken in one of his most beautiful poems. It is an unfruitful landscape, despoiled, denatured by the sad labor of men, and apparently worn out;—

But even so you found, if you sought there,
One happy spot where the grass grew rich,
Even so you heard, if you listened,
The whisper of leaves
And the birds pursuing one another.

And if you had enough love,
You could even ask of the wind
Perfumes and music ...

We shall have enough love! That shall be the principle and source of our wealth.

And so we shall not have a whole life of poverty. When love, that is to say, grace, abandons us, we shall perhaps know hours of poverty. That will help us all the better to understand our hours of opulence, and all the better cherish them.

III

If you wish, we can divide our task, enumerate the coffers in which we are to pile our treasures.

First of all, let us stop over a word. We have said: to possess is to know. The definition may seem to you arbitrary. On the chance of this I open my little pocket dictionary, which is the whole library I have as a soldier, and read: “To possess: to have for oneself, in one’s power, to know to the bottom.” Let us accept that. We shall see, page by page, if it is possible for us to satisfy these naïve, direct definitions.

What is most certain to attract our glance, when we look about us, is the world of men, our fellow-creatures. Their figures are certainly the most affecting spectacle that can be offered us. Their acts undoubtedly constitute, owing to a natural inclination and an indestructible solidarity, the chief object of our curiosity. Good! We shall possess them first of all. We shall possess this inexhaustible fund of other people.

We shall feel no shame then in contemplating, with a noble desire, whatever strikes our senses, the animals, that is to say, the plants, the material universe of stones and waters, the sky and even the populous stars. These, too, ought to be well worth possessing!

Already our wealth seems immense. Our ambition is still greater: we must possess our dreams. But have not illustrious men made more beautiful dreams than ours? Yes, and these men are called Shakespeare, Dante, Rembrandt, Goethe, Hugo, Rodin; there are a hundred of them, even more; their works form the royal crown of humanity. We shall possess that crown. It is for us it was forged, for us it was bejewelled with immortal joys.

It would be vain to extend our possession only into space. It overruns time: we possess the past, that is to say, our memories, and the future in our hopes.

And then we also possess, and in the strictest sense of all, our sorrows, our griefs, our despair, if that supreme and terrible treasure is reserved for us.

Finally, there will be times when we possess nothing but an idea, but this may perhaps be the idea of the absolute or the infinite. If it is given us to possess God, then, no doubt, nothing else will be necessary to us.

Every time that we possess the world purely we shall find that we have touched an almost unhoped for happiness, for it is always being offered to us and we do not think of it: we shall possess ourselves.

We shall share all our riches with our companions: that shall be our apostolate. And we shall manage in some way to resist the seductions or the commands of a society that is going to ruin, a society that is even more unhappy and abused than corrupt. If, in consequence, we are permitted to glimpse, even if only for the space of a minute, a little more happiness about us, a little more happiness than there is at present, we shall at last be so happy as to accept death with joy.

IV

The greatest of all joys is to give happiness, and those who do not know it have everything to learn about life. The annals of humanity abound with illustrious deeds aptly proving that generosity enriches first of all those who practise it.

Not to mention any celebrated instance, I shall tell you one simple little tale. It is of the truth I live on, my daily bread.

Just now, not far from me, there is a young English soldier from the neighborhood of York who is so severely wounded in the lower part of the stomach that the natural functions of the body have been completely upset and he has been reduced to a state of terrible suffering.

And yet, when I went to see him this morning, this boy gave me an extraordinary smile, his very first, a smile full of delicacy and hope, a smile of resurrection.

Presently I learned the cause of this great joy. The dying man pulled from under his pillow a cigarette he had hidden there, which he had secretly saved for me and now gave me.

V

There are many who preach an unpretentious life and the sweetness of possessing a little garden. The most magnificent of gardens is insignificant compared with this world in which nothing is refused us. Accepting the little garden we should have the air of those dispossessed kings who lose an empire to be ironically dowered with a small island.

If we find it pleasant to employ our muscles in digging the earth, there are a thousand spots where we can easily practise this wholesome and fruitful exercise. But we shall never really possess a single clod of earth because a legal deed has declared that it belongs exclusively to us. The world itself! Our love demands the whole world; the rocks, the clouds, the great trees along the highway, the darting flight of birds, receding into the evening, the rustling verdure high above that wall that vainly strives to shut in the private property of someone else, the shining glory of those flowers we glimpse through the iron railings of a park, and even that very wall and railing themselves.

According to the stretch of our wings, the scope of our desires, we shall possess whatever our hands touch with ardor and respect, whatever delights our eyes from the summits of mountains, whatever our thoughts bring back from their travels through legendary lands.

To possess the world is purely a question of the intensity of our understanding of it. One does not possess things on their surfaces but in their depths; but the spirit alone can penetrate into the depths, and for the spirit there is no barrier.

Many men to whom the law allows the gross, official possession of a statue, a gem, a beautiful horse or a province wear themselves out fulfilling a rôle to which no human being has received a call. Every moment they perceive with bitterness that men who have no legal title whatever to these material goods draw from them a delight that is superior to the enjoyment they themselves get from them as absolute owners. They often find, in this way, that a friend appreciates their beautiful pictures better than they do, that a groom is a better judge of their own stables, that a passer-by draws out of “their landscape” a purer joy than theirs and more original ideas. They take their revenge by obstinately confusing the usage of a thing with its possession.

Jesus said that the rich man renounced the kingdom of God. He renounces many other things as well. For if he shuts himself up within his proud walls, he abandons the marvelous universe for a small fragment of it; and if he is actually curious about the universe, if he appreciates its significance, how can he consent without guilt to hide a portion of it away from the contemplation of others?

In order to express the gross and exclusive possession of things society has invented various words and phrases that betray the weak efforts of men to appropriate for themselves, in spite of everything, in spite of the laws of love, the riches that remain the prerogative of all. They speak, for example, of “disposing of a piece of property,” which means having it subject to our pleasure, being able to do as we choose with it. The sacrilegious vanity of this view of the world gives the possessor, as his supreme right, the power to destroy his own treasure. He could not, indeed, have a greater right than that. But what sort of desperate possession is it, I ask, that considers the destruction of the object possessed as the supreme manifestation of power?

The world has long known and still knows slavery. Lords and masters claimed the extravagant right of disposing of other human beings. They all insisted, as a mark of authority, on their right of dealing death to their slaves. But truly, what was the power of these despots compared with the deep, sensitive, voluntary bond that united Plato to Socrates, or John to Christ?

Epictetus suffered at the hands of Epaphroditus. For all that, Epaphroditus was not able to prevent his slave from reigning, through his thought, over the centuries. Epaphroditus’ right of possession seems to us ridiculous and shameful. Who can fairly envy him when so many centuries have passed judgement on him?

VI

Every philosophy has given magnificent expression to these immortal truths. What can we add to the words of Epictetus, of Marcus Aurelius, of Christ in regard to the vanity of those riches which alone society admits to be of value?

But the poets have said to us, “Do not abandon the world, for it abounds in pure and truly divine joys that will be lost if you do not harvest them!”

The road that ought to be sweet for us to follow crosses now that of the Christians, now that of the Stoics. We may stop now at the Garden of Olives, now at the threshold of that small house without a door, without furnishings, where the master of Arrien used to live.

Our road will lead us even more often through wild, solitary places, or to the pillow of some man who sleeps in the earth, or to the smiling dwelling of some humble friend, or again into the melodious shadow where the souls of Beethoven and Johann Sebastian Bach forever dwell.

We shall not struggle with the mass of deluded man to possess the known, so long as the unknown remains without a master. We shall give up crude material possession in order to dream all the better of spiritual possession.

No, we cannot any longer renounce our kingdom when it calls to us, when for us it sings, hosanna!

And those of us who already have their place in the kingdom of heaven must not hesitate to demand their share of this world also; for the world has been given to all men so that each man, with the help of all the rest, may possess the whole of it.

III
THE POSSESSION OF OTHERS

I

In the exile of the war I have fifteen comrades, and we live side by side like seamen on the deck of a ship. Everything brings us together: work, sleep, play, food and danger. Even our quarrels reunite us, for, in order to quarrel well, you have to know your man: between strangers disputes have little savor.

I never chose these men for my companions, as I once thought I had a right to do. They have been given to me like a handful of fruit of which some is juicy and some green. They have been taken at random, as if by a drag of that net which respects nothing, from the swarming species of man. Thanks, therefore, to the blind and divine world which has thrown the net into the flood!

They are my treasure, my study, and my daily task. They are my purpose, my horizon, my torment, and my recompense.

Although far from my own people, far from those with whom I have carried on my life, I could not feel myself destitute, abandoned; the world is not empty for me since I have these fifteen men to manage, this cherished problem to ponder, this soil to work over, this vintage for the winepress.

I accept the gift, the restless opulence, the fifteen glances that open on fifteen different heavens where there shine neither the same seasons nor the same stars, those fifteen proud, vindictive souls whom I must win over and subdue like wild horses.

To be sure, a few of these men are frank, level in temperament, as plain to the eye as a smooth pebble on the beach; one touches them, holds them, grasps them in a moment like a big piece of silver in the hollow of the hand. But so many others are changeable, furtive, so many others are rough like ore in which only the fissures glisten and betray the inner nobility.

The more unresponsive and secretive they seem, without any obvious beauty, the more resolved I find I am to look upon them as a treasure, to search through them as if they were a soil that is full of wealth.

There are some of them that I love, there are some whom I think that I do not love. What does it matter! The interest I devote to them is not in the least dependent on the throbs of my heart. That one who never speaks and conceals, under his obstinate forehead, two little eyes of green glass,—certainly he does not naturally arouse my affection. Nevertheless, how different is the attention with which I regard him from the curiosity of a scientist watching the stirrings of fish in an aquarium! It makes me think, that attention, rather of the dizzy joy of the miser who weighs a gold-piece, the effigy on which doesn’t please him. Gold, nevertheless!

True! How could I feel bored with these faces turned toward me, with this choir of human voices singing, each in its own familiar key, yet blending into the masculine clamor of an orchestra?

Everything they say is precious; less so, however, than what they keep to themselves. The reasons they give for their actions astonish me at times; those they do not confess, especially those of which they themselves are ignorant, always fill me with passionate interest. A word, fallen from their lips like a piece of paper from an unknown pocket, arrests me and sets me dreaming for long days. About them I build up daring and yet fragile hypotheses which they either obligingly support or destroy with a careless gesture. I always begin again, delighting in it; it is my recreation. I enjoy finding that my hypotheses are right, for that satisfies my pride; I enjoy finding I am wrong, for that reveals to me leafy depths in my park that are still unexplored.

And then I know that only a small part of their nature is involved in our intercourse. The rest branches off, ramifies out into the perspectives of the world. I think of it as of that side of the moon which men will never see. I reconstruct with a pious, a burning patience that life of theirs which is outside this, their true life, endlessly complicated, linked by a thousand tentacles with a thousand other unknown lives. So must Cuvier’s mind have wandered as he turned and returned a fossil tooth, the only vestige of some vast, unknown organism.

There is all this in people, and then there is the past that each one has, his own past, his ancestors, the prodigious combination of actions and of souls of which he is the result. And there is his future, the unexplored desert toward which he stretches out anxious tentacles, and into which I dare to venture, I, the stranger, with trembling heart, the tiny lantern in my hand.

These are my riches today. They are inalienable: a man may flee from an indiscretion, he cannot escape the grip of contemplation and love. Even if he desired it, his very struggles would reveal his movements, betray the deepest secrets of his being, deliver him over bound hand and foot.

As for myself, eager to hoard up my treasure, I give myself up without a struggle. Rich in others, I yield myself into their hands. And if, in spite of myself, I attempt some evasion, am I not sure to render the prey all the more desirable, all the more beautiful?

II

They say of curiosity that it was the beginning of science. That is not praise enough, it sounds rather like an excuse.

What is more human, more touching than this religious reaching out toward the unknown, this sort of instinct which makes us divine and attack the mystery?

To take pride in not being curious! One might as well take pride in some ridiculous infirmity. It is true that even that is in the order of things normal, and that vanity finds its nourishment where it can.

Doubtless there is a sort of curiosity which is both weak and cowardly. It is that of men who dare not remain alone a moment face to face with themselves; they take refuge in loquacity and in reading the daily newspapers. Their fashion of interesting themselves in everything that goes on is a confession that they are unable to become interested in anything eternal. They depend as if for nourishment on that noise which those who have nothing to say are always making. They are like children who cannot amuse themselves alone, or like stupid monarchs who fear nothing so much as silence and their own thoughts, the emptiness of their own thoughts!

And then there are the easy-going people. They want to know everything, the number of your maternal aunt’s children, the price of the furniture and the wages of the servants. They want to know everything and they will never know anything. Their life is spent in forced smiles and in gracefully holding a cup of tea.

Their souls contain vast lists of names, dates and other miserable things. They go through life like beasts of burden, weighed down under loads that have no value.

There are maniacs, too, perverts, freaks, people that are full of curiosity about a postage stamp, the handle of an umbrella; but of these I dare not say anything, for I remember an old and very wise master who used to say to us with a smile: “You who are entering upon scientific careers must begin right away to think about collections, even if you have to collect boxes of matches.”

To tell the truth, is it our business to be wise, to be learned? Hardly! It is our business to be rich.

Well, then, there are not two kinds of curiosity. Let us leave out of the question all those dull stupidities we dare to call by this name.

The curious man seems strangely uninterested in that which excites the loquacity of trivial souls. He does not trouble himself to find out the year in which a house was built, or the honors accorded to the architect; he dreams in secret of the tastes, the passions of the man who had that little, low window pierced on the north side and that black tree with its twisted branches planted at the edge of the pond. He does not ask a young woman the name of her dressmaker, but trembles at the thought of understanding what made her choose that disturbing dress to wear this particular day. He does not question his mistress about her opinion of him, but seeks passionately to understand the opinion he has at this moment of her. He does not hasten to ask his travelling companions about their professions and the political opinions they uphold, because, as he watches their faces, he is studying discreetly and sympathetically the meaning of the little wrinkle that moves between their brows, or the significance of a glance, its source and its object. He does not solicit confidences, he receives them almost without wishing to; they come naturally to him; he is their sure and deep receptacle.

Curious about all this vast world, he seems especially concerned with its image in himself. He bears his curiosity like a sacred gift and exercises it, or rather honors it, as one would perform the rites of a cult.

Do not say you would not wish to be that man. You who feel pride in possessing yourself of a secret, in drawing out a confession, in meriting the confidence of another man, must realize that it is a marvelous fortune to be thus the tenderly imperious confidant who cannot be denied, though often the rest of the world knows nothing of it. And it is possible for you, even if you cannot become such a man at once, at least to labor to become one. Begin, with this in view, to deliver yourself from your little servile curiosities. Let us work together for this future. Let us enter so deeply into ourselves that people will say of us, “That man is not curious about anything.” From that moment we shall have begun to chant the hymn of the great, the divine curiosity.

III

The possession of others is a passion, that is to say, it is an ordeal, a painful effort. This supreme joy, like all the joys to which we attach value, is born out of suffering.

We must experience men in order to know them, and our neighbor for whom, or through whom, we have never had to endure any anguish, has surprises in store for us, or else escapes us altogether: that is almost a truism.

Like all others, this treasure cannot be acquired without effort, without bitterness; but it knows no decay, it never ceases to grow through the mere play of the forces of our life and seems as if sheltered from the blows of fate. It does not, like money, depreciate in value or serve ignoble ends. It only returns to oblivion.

It is not strictly personal. It can be shared and bequeathed. Since it escapes destruction and death, it can become the most precious of heritages; it has this superiority over money, that its transmission is really valid only after it has been in some sort of way reconquered. It must fall into worthy hands that will know how to work to preserve, cultivate and build it up again. In certain points it resembles what we call experience.

To suffer, first of all! That is surely one of the grandeurs of our race, and we truly love our blessings for what they have cost us in tears, in sweat, in blood.

It is repugnant to the spirit to admit that anything can be a blessing which the war has given. The desperate folly of the Western world has engendered and still holds in reserve such great misfortunes that we cannot ransack all these ruins, these heaps of bones, with any hope of extracting from them, as rag pickers do with their hooks, some fragment that is good, some useful bit of waste. No! There is no excuse for this ferocious, immeasurable stupidity. And yet, men have suffered so terribly from one another that they have learned to know one another, that is to say, to possess one another mutually. In spite of my own denials, let me save this bit of wreckage from the general disaster. That is indeed one blessing so dearly bought that we shall not willingly give it up. And I do not speak here only of those who have fought against each other; I speak also of those who have fought side by side, who have shed their blood for the same cause and under the same standards.

Companions have been given us, imposed upon us, association with whom, even when casual and transitory, would once have seemed impossible to us. Living as free men, we sought to control the inevitable as far as possible, to choose our own road and avoid those whose opinions or points of view about the universe were likely to offend our own. We thus made use of that liberty for the most part in order to humor our irritable feelings, to lull our souls to sleep in a precarious security, and restrict the area of our inward activity.

Then came the war and we had not only to suffer from the enemy, to endure unforeseen attacks in regions of ourselves that we considered invulnerable, but to suffer still more from our own messmates, from those who commanded us and especially those whom we commanded.

Could it have been otherwise? No! No! If that suffering had been spared us, we should not have been men, we should not have gone to war, we should not have been those divine animals whom it is so beautiful and so shameful to be and whom we cannot help being.

We have been told that all suffering is sterile, hopeless and without redemptive power. That it only serves to nourish hatred. But how marvelous it is when it engenders understanding, that is to say, possession, that is to say, love!

I have observed that for many men, except in actual bodily encounter, combat face to face, the enemy has lost all individual or specific character and has become almost confounded with the great hostile forces of nature: lightning, fire, tidal waves. The bullet coming from so far away, the shell hurled from beyond the horizon, all these mortal powers are simply like a form of blind destiny. In spite of daily lessons in hatred, in spite of vociferations, these men die courageously, with a resigned despair, without hatred.

But with other, less noble souls, the tendency to aversion and quarreling, thus turned back from the enemy, seeks its objects in their immediate surroundings and finds them, creates them, alas!

My comrades, my comrades, if the uncertainty of your spirit, your agony, the rebelliousness of your afflicted flesh urges you to seek those who are responsible, do not look too angrily upon those who are about you, do not, in your aberration, accuse Houtelette because he is a chatterbox, Exmelin because he is an egoist, or Blèche because he is a rude, morose commander. Do not place your misery to the account of Méry, who is so slow in obeying, and be willing to admit that Maurin is not to blame for everything because his opinions are not the same as yours. At least, if you must draw your circle of animosity, make it so close about you that it contains only yourselves, and seek first of all in yourselves the causes of your unhappiness.

Better still, apply yourselves to looking your suffering in the face, putting it, with insight and precision, to the proof.

You know that a loathsome drink almost ceases to be loathsome when you drink it without haste but with a desire to appreciate the precise quality of its bitterness. Exactly in this same manner you should endeavor to measure, to study your suffering. Instead of abhorring it, try in a way to understand it; it will become interesting, curious, I dare not say lovable.

If Méry carries out your orders badly, consider systematically how he can be made to become, in spite of himself, a really good servant. If Blèche exercises his authority in a way that incessantly wounds you, interest yourself in his brutality, try to analyze his movements, his expressions, his familiar habits, and you will then be in a better position, not to escape from him indeed, but to avoid at times the sting, the cut of his peremptoriness. You will make him restless by doing this, and you will set him thinking. It is not necessary for him to fear you, it is enough for him to recognize in you a free force with which he has to reckon, a force it is wise to propitiate. Meanwhile, to use a colloquialism, “you’ve got him.” Every time you have obliged him to be less arrogant, more just with you, you can say that you have “had” him, as the soldiers so admirably put it.

This possession costs a certain amount of work. But you are willing to toil eight hours in order to earn ten francs that do not remain for a single day between your fingers; you can certainly afford a few minutes of your effort and your soul to acquire a treasure of which nothing will ever be able to deprive you.

IV

The very rich man owns several estates. There is always one that he prefers, that he frequents and cultivates by choice. There are others where he goes only from time to time, at the solicitation of some state of his soul which inclines him to seek, for a period, the mountains, or the ocean, or the open country. There are some, finally, which he does not love at all but of which, nevertheless, he will not dispossess himself because they are part of his fortune.

It is so with you who possess a family, friends, comrades, and adversaries. It is so with you who are able to draw, without let or hindrance, from the immense well of humankind. You must refuse nothing; you must accept everything, find out the value of everything, store everything away. The world of men is a rich patrimony, the exploitation of which is expressly confided to you. You must not be a bad administrator, you must make all your land bring forth its fruit.

Choose every day what is necessary to you, for you are the master.

You must know, besides, how to accept the inevitable and take chances, for you are nothing but a man.

Construct a scale, a clear, harmonious keyboard. Like an organist you must know the right moment to pull the stop of the oboe and unloose the thunder of the bass. The pipes are not at fault: it is for you to become a good musician. The face of Guillaumin suits you in the morning, and his ideas rejuvenate you like fresh water. The eloquence of Maurin is like a tonic in your hours of recreation. But there are desolate evenings when what you undoubtedly need is the deep voice of Cauchois and his affectionate silence.

V

In spite of the legendary ages, in spite of the religions, in spite of the poets, in spite of the marvelous traditions and, above all, in spite of our own deepest aspirations, we must unquestionably abandon the hope of an occult correspondence between souls.

It is a renunciation that it is hard to admit. Every day events envelop us that seem to revive the vanished perfume of mystery. Our reason is in no haste to dissipate these clouds, to pierce these appearances: too well they soothe the irritating need of not being quite solitary in the interior of ourselves, of not being quite exiles in an inaccessible desert.

That nothing outside our senses can reveal to us the proximity of a beloved person, the danger that is approaching him, the death that is coming to clasp him, is an extremity to which we find ourselves reduced without ever submissively making up our minds to it.

A few courageous men have halted before this mountain and undertaken to lift it. Let us leave them toiling in the shadow; let us aid them, if not by our effort, at least by our silence, and wait.

Let us wait, but let us not cease to go forth to other battles. The unknown never fails us. And as for what we shall choose, there is so much in the unknown to allure us, to enchant us! If we give up surmounting one obstacle another will always rise before our feet. From obstacle to obstacle we shall always be led to the foot of the same wall. We shall consume our whole life in the struggle, knowing that the very interest of life lies in that struggle and in those obstacles.

Now and then, detached by great efforts of the pickaxe and the mattock, a fragment of the somber mountain rolls at our feet. We stop it with rapture, we examine it, we lift it with a sort of sadness, in order to try its weight. There is no victory that demands so great a price or seems to us more desolate. It is as if we roused ourselves to a frenzy to destroy the unknown in order that our success might fill us with bitterness. Happily, the unknown is always there.

I find myself alone with the person who of all the world is the closest to me, the best loved, the most perfectly chosen. The silence exhales a light perfume, a unique perfume that seems that of our kindred souls. Oh! how we should like to believe that the essences of our beings, delivered at last, might communicate and unite with each other in the intermediate space, in the impassable abyss!

At this very moment we surprise in one another’s eyes a common thought. Simultaneously, it escapes our lips with a sort of rapturous precipitancy, as if we were afraid of not arriving at exactly the same moment at the rendez-vous, as if we wished, with the harmonious precision of a well-rehearsed duet, to confess together some matchless certainty.

We are happy, filled with astonishment.... But I am not deceived.

I do not yet hold it, palpitating, for good and all, between my fingers, the proof that has been so long sought for. Not yet, this day, have I met face to face either God or the immortal soul.

Only too well I know that some slight sound, some rhythm outside us, the beating of a bird’s wing, the boring of an insect in the old wood of the furniture, the sigh of the wind under the door,—that it is one of these things which has suddenly set our souls in tune, awakened the echoes of affinity in the abysses of our two separate selves. We have so many memories in common, we have so carefully matched our tastes, we have so well unified our material world and tried to blend even our futures together that the very touch of the violinist’s bow suffices to make us vibrate in harmony.

But there must be the touch of the bow, there must be the perfume, so faint that one experiences its suggestions without being sure of its presence; perhaps there is necessary only one of those obscure phenomena which pass the limit of our senses in the twilight where our inadequate organs can only gropingly divine the world.

This is our meager certainty. Very well! Let us not reject it in our spite; for it has its depth, its beauty. We must make it our own, force it to enrich us.

Where the exercise of the intelligence seems to result in the fatal imprisonment of the soul within itself, love enables us to see how the soul can reach beyond its own limits into time and space. In vain does the intelligence prove to us that all this is only an illusion. That illusion is beautiful; let us make up our minds to give it shape. Through its very longings to escape from its confines, the soul may perhaps succeed in breaking them, and it is to love without a doubt that it will owe the miracle of its deliverance.

We possess only an imperfect means of communion. So be it! Let us labor tenderly to perfect that means. It is thus that the creators of science and industry labor, and we must admit that their stubbornness has succeeded in making a very great evil out of a small one. Let us not be less ingenious! This sinister progress ought to give us encouragement: moral civilization deserves as much care as the other sort.

With our brothers, our wives, our friends, let us freely seek to have so many things in common, let us strive so passionately to understand one another, that our thoughts, ceaselessly pressing toward this goal, may continually experience the sense of infinity and eternity.

There lies our path; if it urges us to possess the largest portion we can of the human world, let us first begin by intimately possessing what we love. This possession I am sure is the only real one. They knew it very well, those desperate men who have loved fiercely the mere bodies of women without ever receiving the real gift that can be yielded in a glance, from a distance, with the swiftness of lightning.

VI

There are men who set out from their homes in the morning in the pursuit of wealth. They walk with their eyes on the pavement, they fling themselves furiously into all sorts of petty labors. They dream of lost money, princely gifts, scandalous inheritances, lotteries. They think of gold as of an inaccessible woman whom they can strike down and ravish in a corner. They return home in the evening worn out, exasperated, famished, as poor as ever. They have not even seen the face of the man who sat next them in the subway. That face itself was a fortune.

Do you seek out your friend because, on occasion, he can lend you the sum you foresee you are going to need, because he can speak to some cabinet official on your behalf, because he is a jovial host? If that is the case, you are a slave, you possess nothing. Do you, on the contrary, love him for that way of smiling he has that so delights you, for the candor and tenderness his hesitating voice betrays, his gift of tears and his stormy repentances? If this is so, you are very rich: that man is yours and he is a treasure worth having.

Can you recall the use you made of your first five-franc piece? Most assuredly not! But you will never forget a certain expression which, in your eyes, distorted or made more beautiful some well-loved face when you were a little child. That has, and always will have, a place among your treasures: that day you really learned something of importance, and you have never ceased since to recall the victory and turn it to account.

If you have little inclination to squander your fortune, what is to prevent you from assembling it under one title-deed? A single face, a single soul, is yet an inestimable estate. One may believe one has exhausted all one’s resources, but one is always deceived, for like the earth, the human landscape is always perpetually laboring and bears fruit every season.

The peasant who possesses only an acre is full of pride nevertheless, for he knows that his possession goes down to the very center of the earth.

For many years I have watched the same face, like the faithful horizon stretched across the aperture of a window. It contrives, that face, a thousand things, it expresses and reflects a thousand things, I alone know its touching beauty, since I alone am able to reap all its harvests, since I alone cannot, without a glance, allow the tiniest flower of every day to die.

VII

It is not wholly within your power to be without enemies; it behooves you, indeed, not to lack adversaries. Above all, it behooves you to know your adversaries. From that to conquering them is but a short step. From that to loving them is no step at all.

Do not dread an experience too much; consider your adversary attentively and try to imagine his motives, those that he declares as well as those that he conceals, those that he invents as well as those of which he is ignorant. Think long enough and with enough intensity to understand these reasons, and even to discover new ones of which your adversary has not thought; this will not be difficult for you if you have any knowledge of yourself.

Then make a strong effort to put yourself, in spirit, in the place of him you are combatting. Do not go so far as to detest yourself, but do not refuse this opportunity of judging yourself severely. For a test: perhaps you have entered upon this experience with your teeth and fists clenched; stop when you find that you are smiling and that your hands are relaxed.

One has no idea how much this exercise inclines one to justice, how profitable it is and how destructive of hatred. Too much imagination would perhaps lead you to neglect your own cause; stop in time, therefore, unless you wish to become, as the spectators may decide, either a fool or a hero.

For my part, I have no hesitation in counselling such a practice: it teaches one to conquer, to conquer smilingly. It teaches one to know one’s adversary. And then, too, it is good as everything is good that forestalls and destroys hatred.

There is only one single thing in the world that is, perhaps, really hateful, stupidity. But even that is disputable, and moreover it is always a presumptuous assertion.

Happy is the man who has no enemies. But, I repeat, he who has no adversaries, he who has not accepted those that life offers him, or has not been able to procure any of his own will, is ignorant of a great source of wealth.

There is but small merit in understanding those whom we love; there is a great, a crowningly bitter pleasure, in penetrating a soul that is hostile to us, in making it our own by main force, in colonizing it.

Not to choose our friends, that is to be too self-denying, too modest. Not to choose our adversaries, that is altogether too stupid; it is inexcusable.

A voice whispers in my ear: “We do not choose our vermin, we do not choose our mad dogs....” Alas, no! but that is quite another matter.

VIII

Every time I hear someone use the word “promiscuity,” I recall an experience I once had. An experience,—that is a great deal to say, it was such a slight affair after all.

It was in the days when there still used to be in Paris those omnibuses with upper stories. I was returning home quite late, on one of those fresh, airy nights when one suddenly draws in, through the fetid breath of the streets, a gust that comes from afar and seems unwilling to let itself be defiled, obliterated. I was dreaming all alone, quite to myself, about things of no interest to anyone but myself, but that happily filled the infinite space of the world.

Through the depths of this reverie I became aware of a slight, muffled blow against my right shoulder. This did not rouse me from my own absorption. A second time the blow came, followed by a soft, continuous contact. It gave me a disagreeable sensation.

By my side there was a young boy of sixteen or seventeen, dressed like an apprentice. The uncertain glimmer of the street-lamps lighted up his pale, weary face. His eyes were closed and he seemed overwhelmed with sleep. I noticed that every few moments his head, swaying with the jolts of the vehicle, would strike against my shoulder. He would raise it up with an instinctive movement, only to let it fall back the more heavily the next moment. Once he let it lie there. At the time I was so lost in my dreams that the animal in me alone rose to its defense: I pushed the young lad gently back into his place. It was trouble lost; the next second he abandoned himself anew against my shoulder with a sort of desperate ingenuousness. I pushed him back two or three times, then I gave it up and tried, in spite of this slight burden, to continue my glorious excursion in the interior of my own self.

But I did not succeed. An extraordinary, unforeseen, unknown sensation was sweeping over me. It was a penetrating animal warmth. It came from that head propped against my shoulder, and also from a certain frail, bent arm which I felt slowly digging into my side. The little apprentice was sound asleep.

I bent down my face and felt his breath like that of a child passing in little puffs over my cheek and my chin. From that moment on, I ceased completely to think of my important personal affairs and I had only one anxiety: to see to it that the boy did not awaken.

I do not know how long this sleep lasted: I was warm with a strange, delicate warmth; I had a sense of well-being, I was absorbed, I was penetrating into an unknown universe, as vast, as starry as my own. I could not understand how this contact could have offended me at first, even disgusted me. I had torn off the prickly shell and was tasting, like a nourishing kernel, that human presence and companionship. I was happy and interested.

We reached a place where there were shouts and lights. The little fellow sat up with a start, rubbed his eyes and ran stumbling towards the stairway and disappeared; he had not even seen me.

He did not know what I owed him and that he would never be forgotten.

IX

One must not, at first sight, say that a man is uninteresting and that his face is expressionless. One might as well say that the water of a river is empty when it swarms with vegetable and animal life.

In one’s manner of listening to a man there may be prejudice and suspicion, there must not be indifference or indolence. The soul has, in its arsenal, lenses, microscopes, and powerful sources of light for exploring objects to their depths, through their transparencies, into the innermost recesses of their organs.

At the beginning of the war I lived for two years with a comrade who was invariably silent and indolent; his handsome face remained always so gloomy, his actions remained so devoid of purpose and significance, that I despaired of ever making him my prey; I was simply never touched with a desire to get hold of him.

Then a day came when I heard him greet some happening with a word, pronounced in such a challenging tone that I decided to undertake the expedition. I spent days and days at it, with the pickaxe, mattock, and little lantern of the miner. I have thought of him ever since with stupefaction, as of those subterranean, half-explored chasms where one finds rivers, colonnades, domes, blind animals and terrible shapes of stone.

The nature of the object should not discourage one’s interest. The viper is a dangerous and vindictive creature. The naturalists who have been able to study it have only been able to do so because they have studied with passion, that is to say, with love.

So much to tell you that that sort of zoological curiosity you may bring to the study of your neighbor no more authorizes cruelty than it allows you to dispense with affection.

Extreme attention resembles affection. Contemplation is pure love.